Category: Aquifer

Caught

Your mama drops you off at five o’clock, rolls in with an extra-large suitcase full of clothing for all seasons, a blue balloon nightlight, a patchwork baby blanket, coloring books, picture books, an unopened box of crayons. On her arm dangles another bag with blue toothbrush, blue toothpaste, your special blue cup, the blue multivitamins you take before bed. And at her side, you—a round, far-gazed boy, one hand clutching the fabric of your mama’s jeans, the other gripped around the snout of a stuffed pig in a checkered waistcoat.

 

“Any problems,” your mama says, “just call.”

 

“Yes.” In her shadow, we both keep still while she frets and fidgets, takes out a notebook crowded with tightly coiled numbers. She was like this as a little girl too, your mama—my daughter. All fluttering hands and nervous glances. “I’ve made up your old bedroom,” I say. “Logan can sleep there.”

 

She tears a sheet from the notepad, folds and presses it to my chest. “There’s where you can reach me,” she says. “And that one’s Doreen, his regular sitter. And Mrs. Bogart; she’s got a spare key if there’s anything you need from the house.”

 

Ink seeps through the page, blackens my thumb and forefinger. “Don’t worry,” I say.

 

Your mama plucks you off her leg and guides your hand towards mine. She says, “I’ll pick him up Monday morning. Before preschool.”

 

“Yes,” I say. “Don’t worry.”

 

For an instant, her face becomes pinched, punctured with tension before she breathes and nods. She kneels, cups the side of your head, and kisses you goodbye.

 

The tears begin after she drives away. A lost look, a panicked look, and then a wail that sounds like a ship taking its first voyage away from land. Water plunges past the hull, a huge exclamation, an oil-drum symphony between my ears. You pound a tiny fist on the window, twist backward in my arms. So, we go to your room—her old room—and I barricade the door on stiff-jointed knees.

 

Mama! Mama! Mama!

 

Shriek and shriek until you’re too tired and I can hold you again. There’s a little wind-up music box on the shelf—it plays “Singin’ in the Rain,” and you like that. Twist the handle round and round, sit sprawled on the old Parisian rug sniffling the last sobs away while I go downstairs to make peanut-butter banana crackers. Your mama used to eat those the way a magpie eats ladybirds.

 

—

 

Before I turn off the lights, before I leave the room, you reach across your bed—from beneath the cotton-wool blankets already kicked into a tempest—and say “Balloon.” I plug in the nightlight. Your eyes see further than mine, to something inside the blue Kool-Aid glow.

 

—

 

Almost dawn now, no orange on the horizon but at least a paling of the darkness. Stars begin to fade. Air rises off the ground cold and thick, like a glass of milk fresh out of the fridge on a summer afternoon.

 

And the front door groans open.

 

I can see you from the window, Logan. I can see you teeter down the front path and onto the deserted road, little feet almost too round to balance on—that stuffed pig under your arm better dressed for the cool morning than you.

 

I run.

 

I run and leave the front door wide. Feet naked like yours, over wet grass, past the post box with its tin flag rusted upright. I run fast and hard enough to see just as you dash across the neighbors’ lawn and behind their car.

 

“Logan!” I yell. And then “Don’t worry. Don’t worry!”

 

You keep going, leave footprints in the begonias, footprints in the chrysanthemums. They’re shallow impressions, only the size of my palm. At the end of the yard, you squeeze between two loose fence boards, no wider than the stump of a cherry tree. “Logan!” I yell. The stuffed pig lies grinning, plush-and-tumble on the ground.

 

Run down a back alley, through another yard, and then another. The footprints this time are puppy-dog small, brown markings over a stranger’s driveway. They wobble towards an accidental patch of trees, a scraggly bunch of growth that the men with cement mixers and trucks of rubble forgot to chop down when they built this place forty years ago. Fallen branches murmur at my ankles, but I can see you now. I get closer and you get smaller, smaller—small enough to fit inside one of my winter galoshes.

 

“Logan!” I yell. Nearby, you laugh—because it’s all a game, cat and mouse, grandmother and grandchild—you laugh and dart between the brambles of a knee-high brown bush. Footprints span the length of my thumbnail. Thousands of inchworms hang from invisible threads, and I thrust them aside like tasseled bed curtains. Now the grass wavers where you weave through it; now it doesn’t because you’ve grown too small for even that. You laugh and laugh and laugh, and I follow that sound, follow it around twisted oak trunks, bowing evergreens, and skinny matchstick saplings. Mayflies scatter like wrong-way raindrops. Rooks chitter and fling themselves at the sky.

 

“Logan.” I don’t yell this time because laughter fills greenery. Somewhere close, overhead. “Logan.”

 

Rising light catches the trees in faint silhouette. I look up and there you are, caught in a spider’s web, caught in strands of leftover moonlight, laughing and laughing and laughing and laughing.

 

—

 

In my hands, fall asleep again. I carry you back: out of the trees, across the alley, through the fence, over the lawn. You grow bigger as we go, filling one palm and then two, filling the crook of my elbow and then my arms. I ease you into bed, spread blankets smooth.

 

Tomorrow, when she comes to pick you up, your mother will look head-to-toe at you, at me. She’ll say, “Everything go alright?” And I’ll say “Yes alright. No need to worry.” Maybe you won’t say anything. Maybe you’ll laugh.

 

Steely spider threads tangle your hair. I pluck them free one-by-one, lay them on the pillow while you sleep until your face is crowned with silver.

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His First Night Home

from the hospital, I heard him cry

and lifted him from his bed

and brought him into ours,

and after his mother had fed him,

I rested him on my chest,

which rose and fell with him

until daylight.

 

And when I brought him home

from the hospital again,

after the social worker persuaded him

to let her call me, and after he told me

he thought he was ready to quit

using, I was afraid he might

sneak away in the night,

so I had him sleep beside me,

where all night long I heard

his labored breath, felt,

his legs beat against the sheets:

 

that sparrow, stunned

by the window’s false sky,

trembling in my hands,

catching its breath until

it fluttered and flew away.

 

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Two Poems on Love-Play

Roles

It was late, & you were

wearing your widow suit,

black of 1870s chic,

loaded with bustle.

I did my best Doc

Holliday—Val’s version, cock-

sure & half-goofy. You

laughed. I laughed. Val

would’ve laughed if he were here

watching me paw at your corset,

pull the strings to tighten it.

Moments like this,

we feel happiest,

field mice exploring

magnificent catacombs

of a dusty closet.

I act out in otherness;

you dress up the same:

not faces of whatever

force invented us,

but what we make

of ourselves

when we’re at play.

 

Let Me Be Your Dream Dunce

Bright-eyed desperado on a mission for disaster.

 

Snow-cap climber heading for the peak

 of Mt. Oh-no-one-goes-there-ever.

 

View-taker who topples over the railing of the boat

 into choppy waters you barely save me from.

 

Let me let go of rope, map, & stars—

 

I’ll walk into danger as a fawn

 not fast enough to flee the mountain lion,

 

tell you philosophies of nothing while we sit

 in your dream-Jacuzzi in our clothes.

 

Let me be clumsy, cuss, rant, & stub my toe

 on a jag in the earth,

 my forehead once more on the jeweled moon.

 

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An Introspective Journey

Beast: A Novel
by Paul Kingsnorth
Graywolf, 2017, $16

Cover of Paul Kingsnorth's Beast.

We only need to look around ourselves and the world to know there are many things wrong with our society: How our comforts have made us lethargic, how our technology only divides us, and how the lack of empathy between different cultures has only deepened in recent years. This is the rabbit-hole that Beast invites us to plunge down, in a beautiful exercise of stream-of-thought and self-reflection. Paul Kingsnorth’s poetic prose takes us into the mind of Edward Buckmaster, who has fled his normal life to live in solitude, high in the English moors. While this is not a new concept, Kingsnorth’s novel is original in its form and offers a tilted perspective that gives the narrative a unique voice.

 

Beast is the second novel to a trilogy. The first novel, The Wake, published in 2014, was that same year longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, won the Gordon Burn Prize. Both books stand entirely on their own, with no need to read one before the other. The Wake has been praised for its inventive language, as Kingsnorth merged his own form of Old and Modern English to write it. Beast, on the other hand, experiments with sentence structure, and you’ll find, as the narrative progresses, certain rules are either lost or forgotten. It’s notable, at first, then it becomes a part of the book, and then a part of the character.

 

Edward Buckmaster’s voice is both simple and dynamic in the constant questioning and reasoning between which he traps the reader. He has fled to the moors to find himself, to let nature overtake him, and eventually find enlightenment, as if it were that easy. We find Edward at the beginning of the novel already more than a year into his self-imposed exile, standing in a freezing river and letting the cold water numb his body. “The river sang and kept singing,” and Edward welcomes pain and challenge in the forms of nature and his own fasting. It’s not long before a powerful storm finds him and breaks his body. From this point on the core of the story begins. The sun stops setting, his food runs out, and it’s not long before a creature of some sort begins to stalk him. There are no other characters to be found, except in his memories. Even then, they appear as wisps and phantoms.

 

While there are only hints as to what Edward leaves behind in his earlier life, we rarely find ourselves caring about them. He is here now, high in the moors, alone with the rawness of nature and the creature. Besieged with hardships, fog, and visions, Edward must push himself forward. The sense of time becomes lost, as well as any firm sense of reality. That’s not to say that Edward is an untrustworthy narrator. Rather, the effeteness of Kingsnorth’s prose wraps the fog around his readers as much as it does Edward. We get tangled in the “hot and muggy and still and the sky was a uniform white across the farmyard and over the top of the silent ash trees” sentences that go on and against each other, through Edward’s head and seemingly out into the moors.

 

While the strength of Beast lies in Kingsnorth’s unique prose, at times readers accustomed to plainer fare may find it difficult. The 164-page novel ends up feeling a bit longer, as it becomes necessary to put the book down at times to consider Edward’s thoughts or the surrounding circumstances he finds himself in. The prose insists that you digest each sentence properly, lest you miss some hidden meaning. It brings on a fascination at the level of language as opposed to plot and requires the reader to live inside the world of the novel and inside Edward’s head.

 

The search for meaning in life is as old and cliché as literature itself, but there is very little that is cliché here. The narration moves from one thought to the next in a translucent, stream-of-consciousness manner that conveys Edward’s thoughts as if they were your own, contemplating topics and issues that are very much prevalent in today’s world. Indeed, Kingsnorth’s elsewhere-stated love for nature, ecological advocacy, and warnings about global warming are underlining themes that come to life in his settings as well.

 

To read Beast is to make a journey of two sorts, as it may be impossible not to consider your own value as Edward considers his. That is the beauty of Beast—it captures that essence of self-doubt that haunts all of us. Though we may or may not find what we are looking for at the end, there is a sense that the answers have been looking for us as well. The third and final novel in this trilogy has been said to take place two thousand years after the story of Beast. One can only wonder what new form Kingsnorth’s imagination will take in that far future.

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The Flood

It was a hard winter. Everything became further away and darker. The roads battered cars; they buckled and heaved and slowed everything down to the point that I stopped wanting to go out. Every time I got in the car, I imagined my own death. I asked myself, Is where I am going worth sliding off the road into the cold water, into a dark tree, into another frozen, creeping vehicle, into the smooth blade of a state plow? So I cut back. I worked from home. I did my grocery shopping once a week, on Sunday afternoons, although by the time I left the store it was already getting dark around the edges of the mountains and I had to follow the lights of my high beams up the valley road. Other things were cut away, visiting friends, going to dinner in the bigger town, seeing a movie, shopping, going to the gym; all these were non-essentials. I imagined that that winter was like the start of the end of days, all of the good things, the extra of civilization falling off.

 

I saw death everywhere. People were freezing in their homes, the news channel reminded us to check on elderly people, our oil bill asked for a donation to help those who had no money for heat. People got thinner, tougher, and meaner. I didn’t make eye contact in town. I pulled my coat collar up and my hat down over my eyebrows. I kept safe at home.

 

Joe and I started to lock the doors when we were out. I don’t know if we ever spoke about it, or if it was just something we both felt at the same time. We locked up the poor, little cabin, and all of our poor, broken things inside of it. People were stealing dogs and selling them. People were taking the copper and gold out of the underbellies of cars. They were even carrying off firewood. We watched the long driveway for strange headlights in the dark and looked in the snow for tracks, for footprints, for signs.

 

The cabin we were renting sat at the base of a cliff covered with tall, straight spruce trees. A swift stream ran between the cliff and the house, always in white water, stumbling over huge boulders. The stream rattled and spilled down through the rocks, collecting in big pools, bottomed with smoothed bedrock or soft sand. Just below the house the stream flattened onto a broad flood plain, mingling with another mountain brook. The two waters came together and raced along, white, towards the Connecticut River.

 

The cabin was heated by a cast-iron woodstove. There was a backup propane heater in the living room and another in the bathroom downstairs, but we could never figure out how to run them because the instructions were in French and the pilot light would not stay lit—it would flicker blue and then vanish back to air. The stove ate through wood, burning fast and hot. The place had been a summer home and, looking to make money quick, our landlords had done almost nothing to winterize it. There were gaps under the doors and where the windows met the wall. There was a hole in the ceiling above our bed through which wasps spilled in the summer and in the winter the cold would come in and hover over us as we tried to pull the blankets up. Worst of all, the house was built on stilts because the stream flooded often. They had surrounded the stilts with black plastic and fencing but still the cabin sat on air, a freezing pillow of winter that reached up through the floor. The dogs would refuse to get off the couch; the cats would walk the backs of chairs, over lamps, across the windowsills to avoid having to touch it. The stove fought the cold, but the heat wouldn’t stick—it would just slip away so that even as the stovepipe glowed amber the cold sat in the bathrooms and the laundry room and the downstairs bedroom. The cold was more comfortable in that home than the heat.

 

That winter I lived heavily, wrapped in layers. I wore two pairs of socks and walked the floors in slippers. During the day Joe and I rationed wood. The winter was so long and cold that we were worried that it might not end, and we would be left with no fuel. We’d keep the house right above freezing, so cold that the olive oil became solid in the pantry. I lost all sense of my body. I was never naked except for the brief moments between the shower and my towel. I felt like I gained twenty pounds, but, I don’t know, it could have just been that my body became alien to me, strange, a buried thing.

 

I stayed inside and watched TV wrapped in a fleece blanket on the couch. I cross-stitched Christmas stockings for Joe and me and for each pet. I went to bed early and slept late, following the long darkness. I walked the dogs with a headlight. The trees rose like bodies, and the shadows behind the trees became monsters and thieves. The winter made us animals. It took away everything nice and human. We were cut back down to size by it; we were bodies that needed calories and warmth. We could have slept for days, like skunks and bears. We stopped dreaming for anything besides this life. We became smaller that winter, and less beautiful. I lost things I never got back from that cold.

 

The brook between the cabin and the cliffs had been frozen for months. Early in December I could see running water between the icy banks, but then I could only hear it, dark and rough. The ice grew and grew in the cold of those days. It was the only thing that got bigger. It grew like continental plates. It changed color. Sometimes it was clear, others it was white, or gray.  When there was enough sun, it was blue. The blue ice looked like a blade—it was the ice of the freezing days, when the sun appeared but had no heat, just light in which to cast the world in shadow.

 

When I was out in daylight, I walked the dogs along the ice banks. It was so thick that it made no sound to walk upon it. Underneath I could hear the water, rumbling. The dogs were afraid of crossing the ice in the center of the brook, where they could hear the water. The ice made sounds of its own. It groaned. It creaked and snapped, brittle pops and long breaks. It shuddered like a fallen tree settling into the earth. There were other sounds that were harder to describe, hums, wavering tunes like Tibetan chants that sat right between two notes and seemed to be trying to break the world at its weak parts. Sounds rang along it, down the cracks, through the broad flat shelves. Dripping and grinding.

 

That winter the animals became restless. Fox and deer and coyotes stood in the yard and locked eyes with me through the windows without fear. The cats scratched at all the furniture. On the warmest days, I would try to let them outside, but they refused to step into the deep snow. Instead they tore away the legs of our couch. They peed secretly on the loveseat in the back room. They shredded it too, turning the canvas into threads. The dogs pulled apart my books. They got onto the couch and attacked the cushions until there were no cushions left; they had all been emptied of their stuffing and flipped inside out.

 

By the time the dogs completely destroyed that couch, it was early spring. The light was a little longer in the morning and the evening. The sun has some force behind it. I could turn my face to it and feel something in the sky. There was a day of rain, cold, steady rain that beat the snow down. That night we dragged the couch and the loveseat outside to the backyard, tired of living with those tattered things, tired of flat pillows and torn fabric. We had to pour gasoline on them to start the fire. We waited until it was dark. The gas burst and then snaked inside the forms of the furniture, under the skirts and up the backs, twisting along the wood inside it, slow at first then smoking. Smoking horrible thick black smoke that joined the dark sky. It burnt up the smell of that winter, the animals’ fur and our skin cells, our hair.

 

Joe and I stood back and watched it. The light from the house stretched out to meet us like an apology. We didn’t touch, we gave each other space like the one, or the both of us might burst into flame too. The snow melted out to our feet. The flames came through from the inside of the furniture, wearing the fabric thin and then bursting out hungrily into the air. We watched it in silence. The fire ate up everything and then, gnawing on the bones, the wood, the springs, the bolts, shuddering and collapsing, like skeletons in a mass grave, all the parts mixed up. We kicked the pieces that fell out towards us back into the fire. We watched the sparks rise into the black smoke pillar, following the raindrops back up. Shivering wet through all our coats and boots and hats, we walked back up the hill to the bright house. The fire lay in coals behind us, gnawing on the hardest bits.

 

The ceremony of it all stayed heavy between us. That winter had been hard. Joe had picked up smoking again, standing on the porch just an arm’s length from the door as if it might be warmer near the house. When he had quit, I thought we might be moving somewhere good together. With each night he shuffled in the cold, sucking on those menthols, I didn’t know, maybe we weren’t going anywhere at all because I was slipping too. I started seeing things at the edge of light, in the shadows. My fear of driving at night was a real fear. I saw things, my death, the death of the dogs, of my sisters, huge dark primal monsters made of the hills and spruce and rock. I was scared of little things, headlights in the night. I had to understand every sound I heard, place it, or I rocked myself to sleep, trying to rationalize my terror. The ritual of burning the furniture felt like our first attempt at ridding ourselves of these things, casting the devil out. The house was emptied. We sat at the dining table, looking at where the couch used to be. It reminded me of when we had first moved in, all the blank spaces and how tender we had been with each other.

 

In the morning, the fire was still smoking. I took the dogs down to look at it, the bent nails and twisted springs, the feet and rollers and joints of metal all blackened. I kicked some half-burned pieces into the coals. The snow was melted, and the grass was brown around the fire pit.  The morning was warm; there were invisible walls of heat in the woods and along the driveway. The sun was rising, laying a thick haze over the cold water. It was the sort of day when you are excited for no reason. I went out to lunch; I didn’t eat what I had packed for myself. I bought a $20 bottle of wine for dinner.

 

Coming home, the ice along the road was still solid. I could hear the water under it from the car, running, running. At the cabin, the ice was still solid on the brook, but the water was so loud, a contained scream down the valley. The rain had loosened the sand on the hill, and snowmelt ran off it, picking up big stones and dropping them on the ice like cannon balls. The stones bounced off the ice, bounced into a tree, rattled down with the water, or punched their way through. The water ran like a trapped thing. I couldn’t hear myself think for the noise. The dogs were spooked when I took them out—the rocks had been crashing all afternoon, the water screaming, they had spent the day looking out the windows, wondering what was happening, wondering if the world were coming to an end.

 

The rain came again as the night settled, warm and dark in the valley. Joe and I talked about floods. Two years ago, a tropical storm had burst through these mountain streams and cut off towns for days. It took weeks to get past mudslides, washed out bridges, roads swept away. The brook we lived on had flooded; the water had risen under the house and run through the driveway. Huge rocks had bowled down the hill, knocking over trees in the front yard. Gravel and riverbed were strewn through the woods. The driveway disappeared. A big section of the hill had fallen into the river. It remained a crescent of naked sand and rock where a few trees hung. It was an ugly slash on the hillside right across from the porch; we had looked at it all summer. We also drove past a safe and a refrigerator that the flood had swept up into the trees along the driveway, mixed with river bottom and debris. The people who had been living there when it happened had been stranded; the water pushed their cars up against the pines. They had walked out over the field to the higher, paved road when it was safe to leave the house.

 

We talked about the cuts on the trees along the river that had been made by the flood, how high the water had been, how strong, that it would use stone and wood to cut through things like trees, riverbank, to cut away forest. All the time the noises outside got bigger. The rocks were breaking open trees on the slopes, popping, crashing, and punching through the thick ice and the hiss, the scream of the water. The dogs were looking around in terror at the noises.

 

We lay upstairs and listened to the ringing, crunching, breaking up. It was like a storm but not from above. It surrounded us. At some point, deep in the night, there was a strange, big sound that woke me from sleep. The dogs were sitting at the window; the puppy’s head was cocked to the side. I was too afraid to go to the window and see what they were seeing. The noise finally settled, and the night lay broad and uninterrupted after that. Sleep flattened my fear.

 

At dawn, we could see that the ice had broken up in the night. It was piled in tall cairns in the front yard and it pushed against the trees along the driveway. The water ran—open, seething, twisted gray and white water—so loud as to need to be yelled over. It hissed and boiled like static. With the dogs I walked around the piles of ice, some pieces a foot thick and stacked in piles six or seven feet tall. These heaps bordered the river; I had to climb to look down into the flood. Some of the ice was cut into bricks, and other pieces had been moved in huge, flat sheets, like countertops, and plowed through the yard to the distant pines. Our fire pit had been washed clean, erased; only the grass kept its char. I found pieces of the couch springs in the driveway and charcoal that had been pushed hundreds of feet away by the water.

 

Sometime in the night, the water had jumped out of its banks and knocked the ice back into the trees. The stream had used our driveway as a riverbed until it found its way back to the low ground by our mailbox. For some time in the night, we lived above a huge, rolling lake of ice and snowmelt, a flood, flashing through the land around us.

 

I found a brook trout resting on top of a stack of ice pieces like it had been placed there carefully. I took a picture of it with my phone. This beautiful, bright fish, recently dead and still colorful, six or seven inches long, ended up on top of the ice which had been its ceiling for months. I thought of its strange death, the fear of the flood, the shattering of the ice, the change of its worlds, its gasping for air in the cold night under the dark sky, raised up like an offering to the low clouds. It wasn’t transformation, the slow dawn I hoped for. The thought of the flood roaming our yard in the night scared me more than the endless cold of winter. I imagined water running under our home, under our bed, breaking through the trees, the flood erasing our coals, as if nothing we did mattered and no one would remember.

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The Whole Speaks

An experimental documentary about a modern-day blacksmith and wordsmith, Nelms Creekmur. A text excerpt from his novel, NERBO (from the Italian meaning vigor) provides the backbone for the placement of the moving images, which were shot in his workshop in Atlanta.

 

Video by Caroline Rumley

Text by Nelms Creekmur

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Inventory of a Black Girl & Gourmet Ars Poetica

Inventory of a Black Girl

Model Made: April 27, 1992

Quantity

 

 Item

 

 Details

 

 Value in USD

 
2 Lungs full of broken glass When I cough little bits come loose
And scrape against my teeth
I have learned to bleed quietly		 0

 
27 Bones (in right hand) Formed from statues and statistics
I vote on which ones to break		 0

 
4 Failed deaths Each more urgent than the last 0

 
1 Mouth full of matches Only sulfur passes through these lips
Only fire is respected
I am used to swallowed ash
And burned tongue		 0

 
2 Stolen songs The first, when I was born
The next, I haven’t been told		 0

 
0 Deeds done right (in the world’s eyes)

_____________

 

 Not Applicable

 

Gourmet Ars Poetica

My poems taste terrible, too many chewed up

Metaphors and overcooked analogies.

They need more salt, less narcissism.

More technicality, like practicing to how perfectly

Poach an egg, or be consistent with verb tenses.

 

I need a bigger pot with a sturdy lid

To contain this wild free verse.

Maybe throw it live in boiling water,

Like lobster.

Garnish it with pretty diction,

Say it’s modeled after the classics.

 

One day I’ll be the Gordon Ramsay of the page

Dragging syntax from hell into my notebook.

I’ll subvert entire stanzas into submission,

They’ll say: “Yes, poet” and “No, poet”

And “That’s not the way I’ve been taught, poet.”

 

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Poems of Water

Shark Valley

We ride through the sawgrass, the only humans for miles,

as evening glistens in the shallow water,

 and thousands of white birds

 and gray birds

 and black birds
 land in the mangroves

 to roost for the night.

We talk and stay silent at once as we ride

and imagine wading into the grass

 through knee-deep water
 until we were far enough

 that everyone we’d ever known, everyone we’d loved
had forgotten us. And if we sat down in the water

 until our clothes fell away, and we sang

 to each other like the breezes across the tall grass,

going nowhere, and the minnows nibbled our bodies

 so gently it felt like a new kind of love,

 what could we say to the shadows waiting for us,

arms crossed and scowling, as though they owned our darkness?

 

Love Poem

The names we’ve never spoken, that define us to ourselves

like the rhythm of a river caught inside a stone

smoothed by that river, as it falls toward the sea.

 

*

 

In some other life, I wove grasses and lay down.

In some other life I made a nest, and slept

dreaming like a river, as it slides toward the sea.

 

*

 

How many years did we search to find our lives?

How many years do we have before we leave?

The singing of a river as it falls toward the sea

 

*

 

is a mind without thoughts, pure being, like the breeze

that wakes in your attic, or underneath your bed

and stirs up the dust, while you’re thinking of the sea

 

*

 

and hugging your wife, who’s dreaming in a language

that doesn’t have words yet, and gleams in her eyes

when she wakes in your arms, smelling faintly of the sea

 

*

 

and sunlight in the breeze as it moves through the bedroom

then back out the window, like life itself must leave

the body that held it, or like a wave far out at sea . . .

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The Anachronist

The Anachronist is an interactive narrative set in the year 1596 in which a woman named Anna is set to be burned at the stake. What will be her fate? Your choices will help decide. It is republished with permission by the author from http://peterlevine.ws/anachronist/

 

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Two Poems of the Living Past

Anatomy

Today I eat lunch with the anatomy skeleton

hanging wired together in the art room.

We shake hands. I want to kiss her,

because the bones are real,

and maybe she would bloom out of her decay,

cicada-like and ancient.

 

A quick, perhaps forgivable glance at the pelvis

confirms, yes, it is a she, and I name her Charlotte

because I like the ring of it.

Leave her body to science?

No, never to science. But to art, maybe.

What color were her eyes, I wonder,

lurking like embers in a heap of bones?

 

So old, at least now she presides here,

mutely telling the charcoal-drenched artist,

This is all you are, so look.

And if I sit here often enough, insisting on Charlotte,

maybe the name will rattle something awake

in that bone cocoon, knit muscle and skin over that blank,

and she will blink in slow, lush approval.

 

Rain in Glastonbury

The abbey’s ruined arches jut from the ground

like giant ribs. From beneath them,

this fine mist seems just the thing

 

for atmosphere, camera perfect and on cue.

It mutes every sound—the tread of our rubber boots,

the tour guide’s practiced tones.

 

And the bronze plaque marking King Arthur’s grave,

where he is not buried,

stands quietly matter-of-fact in its lie.

 

We snap pictures. Sure,

with the mist, this could be Avalon.

It isn’t. Maybe that’s why somebody

 

tore down the abbey years ago and used the stone

to build that big, faceless house on the hill.

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Interview: Yrsa Daley-Ward

Cover of Yrsa Daley-Ward's The Terrible     Cover of Yrsa Daley-Ward's Bone     Cover of Yrsa Daley-Ward's On Snakes and Other Stories

 

Yrsa Daley-Ward was born to immigrant parents (Jamaican and Nigerian) in England, then lived in South Africa for several years as she pursued a career in modeling. It was in South Africa that she encountered the slam and spoken-word poetry community and began writing. She has now published three books—a collection of short stories, On Snakes and Other Stories (2013); a collection of poems, Bone (2014; 2017); and, most recently a memoir, The Terrible (2018). Daley-Ward considers herself an activist for feminist, LGBTQ+, and mental health issues, but expressed the hope that her writing is for everyone.

 

Lisa Roney for The Florida Review:

It’s rare to find a fashion model who becomes a poet. I read that you had come across a slam poetry event, a spoken-word poetry event when you lived in South Africa. I thought that was a wonderful story. Did that inspire your frankness? It’s interesting to think about you as this very independent person who speaks about the fashion industry in this very honest way and yet still participates in the fashion industry. I just wonder how you combine these two worlds. Is it the sort of situation where you feel a little estranged from the fashion world? Do you have good friends that are thrilled that you are also writing? How do you combine these two cultures—one of which seems to be based on a certain kind of objectification of women, and yet your poetry is very strong and powerful and feminist and anti-objectification? How do you combine them?

 

Yrsa Daley-Ward:

I think it’s really important to remember—and that’s, I think, the beauty of doing lots of things that are seemingly contradictory—that we’re all multi-faceted human beings. There are models who write. There are people who are seen controversial and wild to our brilliant parents. There are teachers who are engaged in nefarious activities. We’re all like a composite of so many things, and to be in your fullness is really important. I think too much we’re defined by what we do [for a living] or what we look like, even like the gender binary, being super feminine or masculine, so to speak. I love to embrace all aspects of myself. I think that’s super important.

 

TFR:

I think a lot about the spotlight and how the spotlight is different for a model versus an author. Could you comment about how the spotlight is different?

 

Daley-Ward:

It is, and it really shouldn’t be, but it is! It’s sort of this weird Venn diagram that’s happening. I enjoy both because in both there’s an aspect of you and performance and rawness. As much as people don’t appreciate it, modeling is an art form like writing. I do think it is.

 

TFR:

I’m sure it is.

 

I’m just thinking about the spotlight. I think a lot of that performative act. Do you think it’s easier for you to perform as a writer because you have the modelling career?

 

Daley-Ward:

No.

 

TFR:

It’s a different kind of performance.

 

Daley-Ward:

It’s completely different.

 

TFR:

That’s what I was fascinated about. For some reason, I think it had to do with seeing those photographs of you, especially the ones that were with the Guardian article and they were extremely beautiful, but they were also severe and remote, distant. I felt a great deal of distance from you, so I was like, “I wonder what it’s like to be photographed in that context.” I’m sure you are performing that for the camera, yet there is something else that comes across in these poems that’s so powerful and human and down to earth. You had described that first spoken-word event where you read your poem and people applauded for you and loved it—you felt that close human connection. I was just interested in how those two things are different or similar if they tap into each other at all.

 

Daley-Ward:

First of all, that article was really odd because what I said was taken out of context in nearly every line, and I completely didn’t recognize myself in that or in the photos. If you look at any other photo, even in modelling, I just don’t look like that. It was strange. I think most photos capture my essence as it is, but I do think there’s a different spotlight. In modelling, I guess you’d be prepared for what’s happening, whereas you roll up to a writing event and then, all of a sudden, people are taking photographs and it’s just you. But both of them are just different aspects of the same thing. I love balance; I love being able to do the switch between the two. I write every day. I actually do a lot more writing than modelling at the moment, but I really enjoy both elements. I think they can bleed into each other. I think you can show humanity and softness, maybe not in the Guardian article [laughter], but humanity and softness in modelling in the same way.

 

TFR:

I am fascinated by how you developed such a strong sense of self coming out of the religious background that you describe in some of the poems, and in other interviews as well. It’s a very strict, very severe kind of upbringing that you’ve described. I guess the stereotype, especially of women, who come out of that kind of background is that they are very self-sacrificing and they’re very self-abnegating. They don’t have a lot of confidence, and yet you do. You exude strength. Where did that spark start for you that, “I’m me and I’m these complicated things and I’m going to be powerful”?

 

Daley-Ward:

I was lucky enough to have been introduced to literature and language at a really young age by a mom who was a single parent, a Jamaican immigrant, so the need for education and everything like that was impressed on me from an early age. So, I got this gift of opening books and learning about deep and complicated subjects and people who didn’t always say what they meant, people who were doing all kinds of things. I read everything when I was young. I read the Bible, I read the Kama Sutra, both of them very intently. There’s always been dichotomy and contradictions, but I think that allowed me to feel rich. And conflicted—yes—but conflict is very human, isn’t it?

 

The gift of religion helps you understand people because you go to church or wherever it is that you worship, and you see the way people struggle with religion and what they say versus what they do and everybody trying to chase this ideal. Of course, religion has its very difficult aspects, but it’s also really beautiful. Learning to appreciate and see the joy in a lot of different things is something that such a strict religion did for me because as much as I was nervous and I felt like I was not going to heaven, I also loved the ceremony of it and the fellowship of it as well. There are lots of different parts to it.

 

 

TFR:

How would you describe your own religious belief? I felt like Bone in a way moves back in time. I was really touched by getting to the poems in the latter part of the book where they seem to be very kind to your grandparents and your mother. I had formed this question early on which was like, What is your relationship with your grandparents now? What is your relationship with that? You’ve talked about it already a little bit, about the community that you found in the church and the beauty of the ritual and such. Maybe that’s a very personal question, but I’m really interested in that same issue that you brought up, which is about watching people in various religious traditions struggle with what they mean in their own lives. We have a lot of that going on in the U.S. public life right now.

 

Daley-Ward:

Oh, goodness! Yes, so much.

 

TFR:

If it’s not too personal a question, how do you relate to the religious world that you came from?

 

Daley-Ward:

I’m not a Seventh-day Adventist, which is the religion I was brought up in. It’s ever-changing. I’m attempting to fathom what that is. What do I believe still? There were a lot of things that were heavily ingrained, and they never really worked themselves out. Even though I live this life that is apparently the opposite of all of that, there are things in me that aren’t going to come out. I do catch myself on any given day wondering what the truth is. Of course, nobody knows for sure. We live on faith. Especially, Christians live on faith. I am constantly grappling with how I feel about religion and the idea of God versus my idea of the universe. I am spiritual, but religious, no.

 

TFR:

I think that’s really what I sensed in this book, and it comes across really well. Your poem “Poetry,” from Bone, but which you read in an online video, reminded me a lot of Tess Gallagher’s short essay, “Ode to My Father.” Do you know that essay?

 

Daley-Ward:

No, but I’m going to read it.

 

TFR:

I brought it to you.

 

Daley-Ward:

Oh, my God! Thank you!

 

TFR:

She has this wonderful line. She says, “If terror and fear are necessary to the psychic stamina of a poet, I had them in steady doses just as inevitably as I had the rain.” This is an essay and poem about her parents arguing and her father beating her and how she gradually came to forgive him. When I read your poem “Poetry,” I was very much reminded of that.

 

Daley-Ward:

I see the link.

 

TFR:

I wanted to ask what you see as the connection between difficulties in life and poetry.

 

Daley-Ward:

There is nothing that you can’t work up into art. Whether it’s poetry or whether you’re painting or making a piece of theater or anything, what happens to you is going to strengthen what you are doing. The thing I think is so beautiful about poetry is how we can succinctly reach into our hearts and the hearts of other people because we are all having the same experiences on this planet. These experiences transcend, for the most part, class, race, gender, all those things. I think it’s important to have those moments and—I wouldn’t say to document them or identify with them—but definitely reach out. If a poem can make somebody feel somewhat less isolated or that there is somebody else who understands what they are feeling or just put a voice to how they’re feeling, then the poem’s done its job or the piece of art has done its job. Of course, difficulty is gold.

 

TFR:

It’s such an interesting thing about writing. It’s kind of a joke that we tend to say. Something terrible happens to you, and you’re like, “Oh, well, it’s material.”

 

Daley-Ward:

Yeah!

 

TFR:

I think it’s an odd juxtaposition for writers where sometimes they end up seeking it out.

 

Daley-Ward:

Yeah—that’s dangerous!

 

TFR:

Being destructive in their own lives in order to have material. Sometimes that works out and sometimes it doesn’t work out.

 

Daley-Ward:

I guess too much of that could block you. Those difficulties are going to come up. You don’t need to make them happen. They’re part of life.

 

TFR:

Why do you think it’s so important for poetry to reach beyond the “elite,” to reach ordinary people, and what do you think that poetry can do to help ordinary people?

 

Daley-Ward:

We’re all ordinary. We all have feelings. Literature is for everyone, not a select group of people. That’s ludicrous! What can it do for ordinary people? It gives them voice, it helps people feel less alone, it brings us together and we all desperately need to be brought together because we’re so divided. We’re all connected in this world. It feels crazy to me. Poetry acts as a bridge. It brings us closer together, it helps us not feel so alone, it gives an outlook to something that’s inside. If I was not writing, God knows what mental state I would be in.

 

TFR:

Your poems are very, very, very personal, but they also feel to me that they have a social, political edge to them. They have implications beyond the self. I think for writers in particular, the current social state that we’re living through in this world can feel increasingly hostile. How we might work, all of us, writers, to bring people to poetry and to literature where I feel that there is this more complex understanding of other human beings?

 

Daley-Ward:

I think there are so many things. This is actually so exciting because this is starting to happen online—and I know people have a lot of mixed feelings about this—but even the poetry, almost a whole canon already, that has appeared on Instagram has made lots of young people, people who would never pick up a poetry book for fear that it might be boring, which a lot of poetry is . . .

 

TFR:

Sometimes it is!

 

Daley-Ward:

Things like that—poetry in dance, in films, poetry with music, going to prisons, teaching it in schools. Impromptu poetry performances on the street would bring so many people to it because they realize, “Oh, it’s not this closed shop. It’s just people talking about their feelings.” If more people knew that and didn’t think that it was this thing that is closed. Honestly, there is just so much poetry that I don’t understand. I know it’s so clever, but I don’t think I’m a strong enough reader of poetry yet. I buy poetry books by the bucket-load, but I’m still learning how to read it and how to access that super academic poetry. I love everything, but it’s important for that not to be the only thing.

 

TFR:

I agree. That’s one reason why I was so drawn to your book.

 

Daley-Ward:

Yes.

 

TFR:

Partly, it was that contrast with some of other poets. Just the contrast is a wonderful thing. We can have both of these things. We can have the world where someone is paying attention to every single syllable and creating some kind of sonnet or some kind of formal poem and yet, we can also have poetry that’s raw and down to earth.

 

I’m also really looking forward to your memoir [The Terrible]. I love that you said, “It will tell everything.”

 

Daley-Ward:

It pretty much does.

 

TFR:

What do you think is the relationship between truth-telling as an important kind of upstanding thing to do and rebellion for shock’s sake? What’s the relationship between those two things? How do you think about truth-telling?

 

Daley-Ward:

I think it’s a powerful tool in a world where there is not a lot of it, unfortunately. I never intended to write a memoir or tell anybody anything about myself, ever, but it’s just the way in which this has come to me. There were doses of fear that come along with that. When I started to examine what the reason for this was, the most important thing that came out of nowhere—and which gives me a reason to be here and sit down and be able to do all this, without turning me into a nervous wreck—is just the fact that I think to be here is to be in service to the world, in service for people for whom these experiences are completely normal. When I speak about marginalized communities, it’s not only people of color, queer people, sex workers, people who’ve been involved in what we call criminal activity. I’m a deeply private person, but something about making this kind of work is stronger. I was talking to my friend today on the phone and we were just talking. I get some lines sometimes when I’m just chatting and I said to her, “My destiny is louder than my comfort.” I was like, “Oh! I’m going to Tweet that!” It really is at this point. It’s become more important to do that.

 

TFR:

It’s gone beyond yourself and your expression. You feel a responsibility to other people.

 

Daley-Ward:

I do! Otherwise, how are we going to do this? Our sex workers are going to think that they can’t write the next bestseller. Children of color who live on council estates or in the hoods are going to think they can’t write a Pulitzer prize.

 

TFR:

Especially now, because we do seem to be in a time of shrinking opportunity where the rich get richer and everybody else is left behind. It’s scary sometimes, especially in terms of education. I understand that completely, that sense of responsibility for bringing that forward.

 

Could you comment on Instagram and other social media as a method of artistic expression? Do you see social media as the future of poetry and other literary forms? What are the limitations of that?

 

Daley-Ward:

Not completely the future, because where there is progress and wonderful work on Instagram, one of the issues with things happening on mass media is that, sometimes, it might lose its power. That’s a small price to pay because it’s making literature current. Literature has always been current, but now to reach everybody, because almost everyone has a smartphone. As much as people who have an attitude about this won’t like this, I think it’s wonderful because if you were never interested in poetry, now, these days, people will be engaging with poetry whether they know it or not, which I think is wonderful, especially for young people, the next generation.

 

TFR:

What’s next for you?

 

Daley-Ward:

Every day I ask myself that. It’s The Terrible next. I just finished my final edit of that which has been a really interesting process. I’ve just relocated to New York. I love to meet people and I love to read poetry, and I hope to do so much more of it live. Sometimes I do it with musicians. Just to be doing what I love and to create more work constantly. I hold myself accountable in that way—actually getting stuff done. So, writing and really documenting this time because it feels really special. It’s very important to me.

 

TFR:

Any last words of wisdom?

 

Daley-Ward:

I don’t know that I’m wise.

 

TFR:

Or last words of spirit?

 

Daley-Ward:

I would say that in this world, it’s more important than ever before for people to feel empowered to tell their stories because their stories are very valid, and if you are worried whether it’s strong enough or good enough or whether it’s compelling enough, always know that the thing that is the most raw and honest will be compelling to other people because we are all connected. If you have a story that you want to write, tell your story. We really do want to hear it.

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Puncture

Melissa’s mother was the first to spot Sonya in the ICU. She looked at Sonya like everyone back in Largo did, bouncing around her forehead and cheeks, connecting constellations instead of meeting her eyes. The older woman was more lined, fatter—a grandmother, for now—but still recognizable, standing guard outside the room. A whole room reserved for a baby the size of two cupped palms. Sonya remembered reading somewhere that they couldn’t rush new mothers out of the hospital, were legally required to let them stay, even for the stillborn.

 

Sonya’s skirt set stood out against the scrubs and denim-clad VA dwellers in the way she had always wanted to, but she felt garish amongst the multitude of reflective surfaces magnifying her face’s blistering peaks and craters. She tucked her pink nails into her palms.

 

“Sonya. I don’t know if you should have come,” Melissa’s mother said. “This is for family.”

Sonya privately agreed. She averted her eyes. There was a man in the hallway repeatedly ramming his wheelchair into the wall, humming to the tune of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

 

“I’m sorry.” Sonya shoved the terrible stuffed dog she had picked up for the baby into Melissa’s mother’s arms, wincing at its pinkness. “I’ll go.”

 

“Don’t be sorry,” a voice—sounding like sixteen, picking at garden salad in the lunchroom—said behind her as she turned to go, and boom, Sonya was back in high school. “You’re her Aunt Sonya. You should be here.”

 

—

 

Sonya heard the bad news about Melissa’s baby from her old high school’s secretary over a bin of Japanese sweet potatoes. The Whole Foods was new and out of place in Largo, both in budget and stature. Its skeleton loomed, folding over the Chicken Shack and DQ like some sort of brutalist God. She thought it would be safe to stop in, that no one she could have known from her childhood would be interested in green juices. She was wrong.

 

“Oh, honey, you’re home!”

 

The local high-school secretary, a bird-like woman with hair cut severely by the chin, dropped a pack of spiralized zucchini and pulled Sonya into an embrace. In the fluorescence of the vegetable section, her skin was cling wrap.

 

“I should have known,” she sniffed into Sonya’s collarbones. “You were always such a good friend to Melissa.”

 

Melissa was one of the neighborhood kids. Sonya had gone to school with her, grown up crawling under their desks during lockdown drills and pinning yellow ribbons to their spirit shirts. Melissa used to have two dogs and a brother in Iraq. Sonya was not in town to see Melissa. She hadn’t seen or spoken to Melissa for years.

 

Sonya was in town because her editor had sent her to do a piece on the opioid epidemic. Readers love a good tragedy, The Cincinnati Inquirer was rumored for a Pulitzer for its heroin article, and rural Florida provided a double whammy.

 

“Have you visited yet?” The secretary’s eyes were now leaking, and she attempted to wipe her dripping nose with her sleeve.

 

“No,” Sonya said, honestly. “I actually haven’t seen Melissa in . . .”

 

These encounters were always awful. She hated seeing people from home, hated the three-hour JetBlue flight, the drive to Largo in a rental car. Hated each cluster of mobile homes she passed, the lurch of pity upon seeing their dreadful names. Paradise Cove and Palm Valley and Dolphin’s Wave. The backs of the signs adorned with crude depictions of genitals and pentagrams and the number 666. The kids she grew up with: now strung-out cashiers and mothers and dealers-   how she would have to fix her face so as to not to wear her pity.

 

She rubbed at her eyes. The secretary seemed to take this as an expression of grief, and reached out to touch her, managing to snag her silk blouse.

 

“I know, honey. It’s just so terrible. For it to happen to your best friend.”

 

Sonya had no idea what the woman was referring to, but she agreed. She called her mother while waiting in line with a pack of organic blueberries.

 

“Ma,” she asked, in place of a greeting. “What’s wrong with Melissa?”

 

—

 

Motherhood had softened Melissa’s already round figure, made her ruddier. She was wearing an XXL Tampa Bay Buccaneers shirt from their 2002 Superbowl win. Somewhere, Sonya had a matching shirt. It went down to Melissa’s knees, swallowing her baby weight.

 

“You’re her Aunt Sonya,” Melissa repeated, her voice very full. “We want you here.”

 

Sonya had no brothers or sisters. She knew she wasn’t an aunt now, would never be one—she was just a girl who had no one else to sit with in high school— so instead of speaking, she stepped into Melissa’s arms.

 

Over her shoulder, Sonya saw it, and tried not to scream.

 

Under an assortment of tubes and blankets, partially shielded by a monitor and surrounded by well-wishers who looked carefully at the floor, was a red and purple smear. A tube, running under the slits where nostrils go, was the only indication that it was breathing.

 

A man quickly blocked it from her view. She knew without looking at her hand that she had drawn blood.

 

“This her?” he asked.

 

Melissa released her.

 

“Sonya, Craig. My husband.”

 

Sonya once did a story on self-flagellation, reporting on a radical church that encouraged sanctioned beatings in preparation for adult baptisms. She had thought the practice to be barbaric—perverted even—the shivery way the pastor talked of pain, the way it overtook his face.

 

Craig, quite simply, looked mad. He looked like the radical Christians, had the jumpy sort of depravity in his eyes that made cops slow down at traffic stops.

 

“I’ve heard a lot about you. Glad you could come by to see Jay.”

 

Jay, Sonya realized, was the swaddled lump.

 

Sonya had no doubt that Craig didn’t want her there, or any of them. Craig wanted to be taking pictures of a pink lump of blankets for his terrible Facebook page. Craig wanted to take his weapon from base and execute them all into an open ditch. Craig wanted to be in a two-bedroom, reheating a Lean Cuisine he had let go cold while enraptured by the sight of his poor, scarred baby inhaling into his wife’s breasts.

 

—

 

Melissa wasn’t Sonya’s best friend. Melissa was pale, with a quick smile and cowhide hair that she got cut, short and boyish, at Fantastic Sam’s. She sat with her doughy legs spread and was always eager to show her overlapping teeth. In high school this outweighed her fantastic empathy, so no one spoke to her much.

 

No one spoke to Sonya either, because of her acne: rippling under her dark skin, cystic and mean. A teacher told her once in Geometry class, Have you tried putting toothpaste on it? in front of everyone, and only Melissa hadn’t laughed.

 

“That was wrong of her,” she had told Sonya seriously, after class.

 

“She’s a bitch. I can’t wait to get out of this shithole state.”

 

“She did something wrong.” The repetition sounded solemn, like a prayer.

 

Melissa had a strict sense of justice ingrained in her. She wouldn’t let Sonya copy her math homework and couldn’t wait to join the Navy. That’s what her family did.

 

“I want to be a Marine,” Melissa would smartly tell any adult who enquired.

 

“Better than selling Mitsubishis,” Sonya said, unsupportive. “Or meth.” These were the career prospects of many of their companions.

 

“Bad market for foreign cars,” Melissa mused, missing the point in her round-faced, agreeable way.

 

Melissa was soft while Sonya was angled, forgiving while Sonya taped a slice of deli ham in the locker of a boy who called her pizza face. The only thing they had in common was a love for rap. Melissa, sweet, pasty Melissa could drop bars. She had a collection of CDs living in the cab of her truck. Eminem and Dr. Dre and Wu Tang Clan and Jay-Z.  They were a strict Pac family, didn’t own any Biggie. She knew every word on the Blueprint, could rap until the CD ejected. Sonya remembered that was the first time she admired Melissa for anything. Melissa kept them all in her truck’s glove box, along with her dad’s army knife, a birthday gift. For protection against perverts and coyotes, Melissa said seriously.

 

Their geometry teacher suffered from eight slashed tires that year, sixteen perfect puncture marks.

 

Melissa enlisted shortly after high school, and Sonya applied to Mizzou. There wasn’t really a need for each other, because Melissa had a new family and Sonya had an advice column, but every so often there would be a text or Facebook message, left to stagnate. A few years later, Sonya got a wedding announcement and a pregnancy announcement in the same stack of forwarded mail. That was just what you did in Largo.

 

Sonya couldn’t remember Melissa’s husband’s face, but knew he was also military. He had added Sonya on Facebook, where he inundated her timeline with racially-tinged articles from websites like “Truth for America,” all with headlines insisting that she should watch the liberal congressman get roasted by a ten-year-old boy-scout.

 

After the election, she blocked him, which was why she missed the Go Fund Me for their baby, and the message asking for her prayers.

 

—

 

“You should go pay your respects,” her mother had said, when Sonya returned with blueberries and unfounded guilt. “You’d be a comfort.”

 

Sonya’s mother belonged to the Advice Stitched on Pillows School of Thought. She wore her hair natural and made a big show of disapproving of Sonya’s silk press, reminded her how her oily hair would antagonize her skin. Wore her Walmart Greeter vest, McFlurry in one hand, always eager to spout the contents of a greeting card. She had loved earnest, ugly Melissa.

 

“I don’t know her anymore, Ma.”

 

“But she knows you, honey.”

 

“That doesn’t even make sense!”

 

Sonya scratched a scab. When she wasn’t writing or smoking, she was usually picking, collecting skin under her fingernails. Her mother would stare at the spots while she spoke to Sonya, would dart straight to her hands. Once, long ago, she had rubbed cayenne powder on them, in an attempt to stop Sonya from picking. It had sent her to the emergency room.

 

Her old bedroom was the front room of the trailer. It was originally a screened-in porch, but they had put up Plexiglas to mimic windows. You could hear coyotes at night.

 

She found her old cigar box, her hidey-hole, and smoked two ancient joints. Blew the smoke in the face of her mother’s terrier. Sonya refused to call it, to take it out, so that she wouldn’t have to say the name. She watched as the dog keeled over, tongue lolling, uncomfortably high.

 

The dog was called John, after Sonya’s father, who had left for another woman when Sonya was ten. Sonya’s mother, unfazed, went to the shelter, picked up the runt, named it after her ex-husband. Spent most of her days writing rambling letters to local judges and other semi-elected officials, demanding her husband pay his alimony.

 

Largo’s streets were laid out like an outstretched hand, mid-grasp. Sonya’s house rested on the tip of the pointer. The VA hospital sat on the thumb; to reach the drugstore you had to head toward the palm. She drove there, still baked, and found herself in the Hallmark aisle staring at the row of stuffed animals beseechingly, as if asking one to volunteer. She settled on the one with an unbearable face: a pink dog with cross eyes, one sewn lopsided, and drove to the hospital with it in her passenger seat, looking like a pitiful co-pilot.

 

—

 

Melissa spent the afternoon pointedly not looking at the mess of tubes, ignoring the padding of family members and stuffed animals, preferring to stare curiously at Sonya, as if she were the spectacle.

 

“How are you?” Melissa prodded, leading Sonya to a chair. Serene, like the pictures of Mary under the cross. Sonya stared at her, trying to detect fissures in her blankness. She found none.

 

“I’m so sorry, Melissa.”

 

“Working?”

 

Sonya wanted to hit her. Your baby, she wanted to scream. There’s something so wrong with your baby.

 

“Yeah. Can I get you a coffee or something?” Sonya asked wildly. “Let me bring you guys something. Craig?”

 

The baby mewled, and Craig recoiled as if she were a grease fire. There was a hitch in the beeping of the monitors, a collective wince.

 

“Can you get her something?” Melissa asked everyone and no one. “Something to make her sleep?”

 

Now, Sonya was beginning to understand better, beginning to crave a willow switch, the scarred backside. The self-flagellators had told her during the interview: The devil is inside you. He touched you, and they pointed at the scabs on her face. You need to beat him out.

“Little blue Jay,” Melissa’s mother said. Melissa jerked in response.

 

“Don’t call her that. That’s not her name. It’s Jay. Just Jay.”

 

Sonya raised her eyes from the tile, skipping over Jay-Just-Jay, and scanned the room.

 

No one knew but her that Melissa hadn’t named her baby after the bird. This made Sonya too guilty to breathe, too guilty to be inside herself. She went out into the hallway and everyone left her be: the nurses, the doctors, the men in wheelchairs with skin like candle wax.

 

—

 

It had happened before Sonya went to Mizzou. They had been hanging off Melissa’s bed. Melissa was longer, less round, the faintest hint of a tan on her chapped skin. Her hair just brushed the carpet. She hadn’t had to cut it yet. It must have been around the time she started Basic Training. Her last visit home. She turned to Sonya, grinned.

 

“I missed you,” she said. “I don’t get to hang out with any girls anymore.”

 

Sonya was struck by how eye contact was the same upside down as it was right-side up.

 

“Would you do me a favor?” Sonya said, remembering the tires. Melissa nodded.

 

“Punch me in the stomach.”

 

They were both quiet, then did that exchange girls can do with their eyes—Are you sure? How far? You weren’t safe?— all at once. Sonya dug her long, piano fingers into her hand, palms cut with thick fault lines.

 

“Please,” she said.

 

Melissa stood up, dismounted. Gravity had done this thing to her eyes that nighttime did to the neighbors’ lawns. She grabbed her car keys.

 

“Come on,” she said. Sonya followed.

 

Melissa handled the whole transaction. Filled in the papers. Swatted away Sonya’s hand when she offered to pay. Got her a diet Dr. Pepper, too.

 

In the aisle of the drugstore, Sonya washed it down. She wasn’t sure if this sort of thing allowed grieving, but Melissa put on Tupac on the way home, mouthing along— I was raised to be strong— and pretended Sonya was only hiccupping from the soda.

—

Sonya sat on the floor smelling her knees, thinking of the raw pink thing in the incubator, like a peeled crawfish. Somewhere in the wing, a self-playing piano started a rendition of “Amazing Grace.”

 

“Honey?”

 

The nurse had deep-set smile lines down her face, making canals to her chin. Her scrubs strained around her thighs as she squatted next to Sonya. They didn’t get many sick babies at the VA; the nurse must be used to men who demanded final cigarettes and asked for a peek of her panties.

 

“Honey, you’re gonna want to go back in.”

 

“No,” Sonya said. “I’m not even supposed to be here.”

 

She wiped herself with the hem of her shirt, all too aware of the bacteria she was spreading around her face, of the deep-rooted cysts stirring, hungry, in her cheeks.

 

The nurse stared at her, looked straight into her acne.

 

“The family is going to say goodbye.”

 

Sonya just shook her head, like a child. She had to leave. There was a chrome strip across from her that magnified the crustacean on her forehead, just above her eyebrow, that had been throbbing earlier in the day. While in the room, it must have erupted. She touched it, prepared for pus, and came away dry.

 

The nurse left, her sneakers chirping down the hallway. Someone else slid down next to her in the hallway. The Buccaneers jersey.

 

“Why are you here?” Melissa said.

 

I’m sorry I never stayed in touch. I’m sorry I wasn’t nicer growing up. I’m sorry my face looks like this. I’m sorry your baby looks like that. I’m mostly sorry because your baby looks like that.

 

“You took me to the clinic,” she said instead. “Summer after high school.”

 

She slumped a little, against Sonya. It was the first time she saw Melissa’s posture waver all day, saw her at sixteen again, pictured her fat and smiling.

 

“She was premature.”

 

Sonya knew a little about premature babies, assumed that the skin hadn’t developed for Melissa’s. That it was born raw. Without waiting for a response, Melissa rolled up her sleeve to the crook of her elbow.

 

“Look,” Melissa said. Sonya started.

 

“Fucking look.”

 

Under the baby weight and the buttermilk complexion, she hadn’t caught it. But in cloying hallway light she saw it: skin clinging to little bruises in the crease of her arm, veins thick and sagging, like telephone wires.

 

“Jesus,” Sonya breathed. “Melissa.”

 

Sonya raised her nails to her face on impulse.

 

“Don’t pick,” Melissa said absently. “It’ll scar.”

 

It wasn’t Craig that looked like the Evangelicals; no, that must have been a reflection. A strip of chrome. It was Melissa who was mad; Melissa who was rabid. Pupils tight and shiny, like the exoskeleton of a palmetto bug.

 

“Are you . . . now? In the hospital?”

 

“We’re going to do it,” Melissa said, as if that were an explanation. “Say goodbye.”

 

How could she have missed it? The eyes, the skin, all wrong. Not a pregnancy glow—a curtain of sweat. Withdrawal, sickly sweet. And guilt, guilt, guilt—whole body shaking like Plexiglas in a storm.

 

“Will you come?”

 

Did she have a choice?

 

—

 

Melissa’s mother took photos of it that would surely be posted on Facebook, all pink and shiny. It made Sonya want to hurl. Once, one of her mother’s dog had dragged in a squirrel, a plump thing, split at the seams, spilling maggots. It reminded her of that.

 

The nurse was posed in the corner, pressed up against the wall. You could only focus either slightly right or left of the carnage, most choosing to keep their brimming eyes on their sneakers.

 

Sonya stared at Melissa, noticed a tremor, a hand shaking like a screen door. An unfocus in her yellowed eyes. Craig clutched at his wife, and she became the space between his fingers. The nurse asked her a question, soft, and she bowed like a young birch. Sonya could have sworn the baby cracked what would have been an eye, stared at Sonya through the equipment, through the tubes: picking her out.

 

Sonya had collided her bike with a taxicab. She had passed kidney stones, watched her mother pass kidney stones. She had been slapped during sex. She remembered the big pad they had given her in the clinic for residual bleeding, like a diaper, the way she cramped for days after. Had seen pictures of children with legs blown off and women, branded, for their last names. But nothing like Melissa’s mother, thumb on the record button, as the parents each kissed the bundle on what would have been its forehead.

 

The nurse hummed. The beeping ceased. Craig drew away. Melissa didn’t remove her lips, stood hunched for a long time, over the gore, over the tubes, over what would have been the nose.

 

Sonya once saw a man jump in front of a train, saw him blast into pink mist—had to sit in the shower afterward for hours. She wondered all day, Had it hurt?— yes. This was worse.

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The Word of Several Million Years

A meditation on shifting ideas of being home: where it begins and ends. Of being right and wrong: how we lie about the difference.

 

Animation, music, and sound by Morgan Joseph Hamilton

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I Tell My Twin Sister if I Come Back after I Die,

 it sure as hell ain’t gonna be to visit

as a pesky fly, obsessively orbiting her head while

she kneels, nose-pinched, to de-poop the litter box.

 

Or a squirrel, like the one she calls Mom

whenever it pauses halfway up the maple

to stare through the kitchen window as she lights

a cigarette: I know, I know—I promise I’ll quit!

 

If we’re granted the power to return, to embody

some other kind of creature, why would it be

those two ducks who claim her pool every June?

 

Okay . . . so if they are Grandma and Grandpa, 

what do you think they’re trying to communicate

through the shit and feathers you skim out daily?

 

You remember how they loved to swim, she insists,

when I suggest it’s the endless supply of breadcrumbs

she scatters, not reincarnation, bringing them back.

 

Well, if I return, I assure her, it’ll be as a bear—

not at all native to her suburban town—a big one,

who claws a perfect M for Michael into the side

of her shed. So there’s no uncertainty it’s me.

 

Oh my god! Don’t you dare, she says. That shed cost

a fortune! But . . . feel free to carve it into the maple.

 

What makes you think I’m going first anyway? I ask.

Has that fly you call Pop been telling you something?

 

Clean the litter box for me, she says. And ask him yourself.

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Hidden Lives

Bloodroot, by Annemarie Ní Churreáin
Doire Press, 2017
72 pages, paper, $13.99

 

Cover of Annemarie Ni Churreain's Bloodroot

 

While the quote is often misattributed to William Butler Yeats, it was the French surrealist poet Paul Éluard who wrote, “Il y a assurément un autre monde, mais il est dans celui-ci”: There is another world, but it is in this one. It does, however, sound like Yeats, as the quote reinforces the popular view of the grand Celtic poet, the one who celebrates the unseen faerie life, recovering the old stories of the Tuatha dé Danann and the Sidhe. Of course, for Irish poets of the twentieth century, it became a weighty thing, this deep register between the mythic, the landscape, the history, and the poetic voice. And for women Irish poets, an exclusionary thing.

 

So, to come across Annemarie Ní Churreáin’s first book of poetry, Bloodroot, published by Doire Press, I return to Éluard’s quote. Ní Churreáin is no surrealist, but she does look for the life and lives that have been hidden, removed, erased, lives that still are apparent in this world. She accomplishes this achievement with exquisite craft and unrelenting attention, poem by poem. To find the other world in this one, Ní Churreáin suspends her readers in a tight, liminal space, where we must take great time and care to become still and to reflect, so that we see our own belonging, our own alienation.

 

The poetry happens even before you open the book. First, the title and its sonic qualities: Just two syllables, each ending on a hard consonant, but then that slipknot of “oo,” the short vowel in the first syllable, a hard and ugly thud, and the long open version of it in the second syllable, an open and soaring cry that is clipped short with that stopped “t.” Such dexterous language will pervade each poem once the cover is opened. Second, the title and its possible references: a medicinal flower whose roots ooze a red sap; a single root that is the life force of a plant, like a taproot or a blood feather for a bird; or a root that feeds from blood, or has been drowned in blood. All those associations fill the book.

 

The book is separated into three, tight, distinct sections, thematically united: where the poet traverses familial terrain, and then into troubled (and for me recent) cultural histories of Ireland, and then sojourns into India and Florida. Annemarie Ní Churreáin, a native of the boglands of northwest Donegal, is very much the world citizen, evidenced in her receiving several international fellowships and residencies, including those from the Akademie Schloss Solitude, the Jack Kerouac House, and Hawthornden Castle. The thematic breadth of her poetry is thus hardly surprising. Yet, each poem is discretely fashioned, built on its own sharp and unforgiving terms, in language clear, unfiltered, and yet highly wrought. While I have seen some readers say how they glide through Bloodroot, reading it all in one sitting, I am stunned by the poems. I read one or two an evening, and they trouble me, stay with me. Another one would overwhelm me.

 

For instance, consider the way Ní Churreáin constructs a brief lyric in “The Warning,” a poem governed by such a strong, unyielding sequence of voices (just two lines each), but by a disciplined and harrowing parallel structure. Here’s the poem in its entirety:

 

Give us your child, the Pica bird said
or else you go to hell.

 

 Give me what I want, the child said
 or else I’ll tear this House down.

 

Obey house rules, the House said
or else this House will break your bones.

 

 Tell my story, the bone said
 or else we’re all going to burn.

 

Despite its tightly faceted structure, there are slight, slight fissures in the poem, where the “child” and the “bone” are not capitalized, and the brilliant shifting of pronouns in the second line of each couplet: second person, first person singular, third person, and first person plural. The poem’s brevity and simplicity and personified voices also suggest something of the nursery rhyme. And then at the heart of the poem is the urgent and necessary call for witnessing, to tell the story or else. I am left wondering about whether or not we’ll all burn anyway after the telling, after the witnessing.

 

This attention to language partly emanates from the fact that Ní Churreáin is bilingual, a product of a colonized history, and that she is from the hinter boglands of western Ireland. Weighted with the ghosts of her foremothers, to whom the book is dedicated, the simple, hard language is so piercingly employed to speak the truths of the hidden or shamed lives of Irish women, famously the cases of Ann Lovett and Joanne Hayes, two young women in the 1980s who suffered unwanted pregnancies with one resulting in death and the other in pillorying. Ní Churreáin’s is an uncompromising and bold vision: told with a scalded clarity that makes me think of Joan Didion, with a necessity that makes me think of Muriel Rukeyser. But this is all Ní Churreáin, on her own terms.

 

I come back time and again to another brief lyric, “Cult,” as a grounding moment for the collection. In it, she investigates the double legend of Brigid, the pre-Christian Irish goddess of healing and inspiration who was later appropriated and canonized as St. Brigid. In County Cavan, a pagan cult continued to celebrate Brigid, worshipping a stone head capturing her three faces: one a smithy, one a herder, and one a healer. In the 1840s, a local priest was said to have “lost” the stone head in Roosky Lough. Ní Churreáin plainly notes:

 

This is what happens to women who brew medicine,
who bend iron, who drive cattle on their own land.

 

Such powerful women are not only appropriated, even canonized, but then thereafter must be erased. And the poem ends on defiance (and a string of hard “d” consonants), in lines that the place the poet among the original sisterhood, the resistant cult:

 

Dreamless now, I touch the water in the font,
cold as medals, streaked with my own blood.

 

Here, the poet unsentimentally faces the world as it is given, “[d]reamless,” while claiming her own agency and asserting her connection to her past, her real, elemental kin.

I am leaving out so much accomplishment that is evident in this remarkable book, both in terms of Annemarie Ní Churreáin’s craft and vision. There is much more for any reader to discover. This first book gives promise of a vital, important poet whose voice denudes our convenient illusions.

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My Father’s Monsters

1. Here’s how it started: my father, for reasons unknown to me at the time, would periodically come home, loudly insisting, Jeremiah, I saw a monster, and although he was never drunk, and it never seemed malicious—I never thought he was making fun of me—I never believed him, even at a young age, when he would crow about monsters that were very much in my orbit (he pivoted early on from Frankensteins or Mummies or Creatures from Various-Colored Lagoons and started conjuring up hair-raising encounters with beasts from Gremlins or An American Werewolf in London, stopping thankfully short of meeting Freddy Krueger or anything from Alien or The Thing).[note]The strange thing was, he wasn’t even a huge monster movie fan; he eschewed normal ‘dad’ taste, had no patience for Westerns or war movies, and oddly enough preferred staid dramas like Gentleman’s Agreement, and in the 1980s he acquired a low-grade obsession with My Dinner with Andre.[/note]

 

2. This continued unabated until it became a source of concern, and then, more powerfully, more keenly, embarrassment, as an assortment of friends would come by to pretend to do homework, only to find themselves in the inquisitorial hands of Alec Sutton, who would casually ask, as one would the weather, which frightful creation of George A. Romero or John Carpenter or Wes Craven or Roger Corman or Rick Baker or Stan Winston or Ray Harryhausen or Stephen King or H. P. Lovecraft or Horace Walpole (as if any of us had read Walpole!) or Clive Barker or Ray Bradbury (now he was reaching) or Edgar Allan Poe really gave my friend the heebie-jeebies, the screaming mimis, the willies, and whatever answer my father received from his poor subject would (almost) invariably produce a reaction somewhere along the lines of Well, funny you should say that, because the other night at a stop sign and off he would go, in an admittedly impressive display of extemporizing the chilling proximity in which he had found himself to something from an altogether more ghoulish version of our own world.[note]My father didn’t do this more than once, and most of my friends found it either endearing or just the cost of hanging out with me, but poor Freddy Mackenzie told my father that the car in Christine had given him nightmares, and after hearing that my father had seen a ’58 Plymouth Fury driving by our school with no one behind the wheel, Freddy turned as white as if he’d been blood-let, and both Sutton men got a stern dressing-down from Freddy’s mother.[/note]

 

3. Once I found my father casually flipping through an issue of Fangoria—on the cover was a Sasquatch, which I never found frightening and therefore never made it into my father’s bestiary—and this I took to be his admission that the jig was up, that he knew that I knew the monsters weren’t real; he didn’t try to hide the magazine, just continued flipping through pages of creature features while asking me in a disinterested tone how my day was going, and it’s not until writing this that I realized reading Fangoria and Eerie and For Monsters Only was his way of centering himself.[note]I’d like to tell you that my father died and willed me a box of musty, dog-eared penny dreadfuls, but like I said, the man was never one for horror, and I’m fairly certain that most of those magazines wound up in the trash.[/note]

 

4. One time, when I was nine or ten, my father roped his friend Lee in on the act, and Lee told me: “You know, Jem”—he was the only one who called me that, and I always hated it, but it wasn’t for many years that I realized I hated it because I am not and was not a character from Flannery O’Connor or Harper Lee—”all that stuff your dad says, well, it’s not bullshit”—and here my father winced, for he did not swear around me back then, but he did not interrupt—”it’s all true; why, once he and I were on our way to the b—to church”—I knew he was going to say “bar,” but he felt the need to cover himself after his bullshit gaffe, and my suspicions were confirmed when I saw his furtive glance at my father, as if for approval and permission, and in that glance I saw just how much my father meant to Lee Hayward—”and we saw an honest-to-goodness vampire, with the cape, the fangs, the amulet, the whole nine yards”—and here he just kind of trailed off, and while his effort was a weak one, I could see that it meant a lot to my father that Lee had made an effort at all, and I understood then, or at least I thought I understood, the strange nature of male friendship, which sometimes requires you to lie to your friend’s son.[note]One of the only truly nice things I ever did (everyone thinks of themselves as nice, I believe, but few people take the time to quantify it) was to visit Lee Hayward in the hospital after he had nearly blinded himself at work; he couldn’t see very well and was muted by painkillers and therefore couldn’t recognize my voice, so I told him, “It’s Jem Sutton.”[/note]

 

5. When I was in college, my father told me that he had seen the Headless Horseman—which I think was meant to appeal to my newfound sensibilities (I had recently declared myself a Classics major[note]I know, I know, shut up.[/note]), but instead of meeting him halfway and asking about the Jack-o’-lantern head, I tore into him, telling him that first of all, Irving wasn’t what anyone would exactly call a Classics author, I was reading shit like Virgil and Sophocles and Euripides and Chaucer, and I didn’t appreciate being made fun of . . . okay, yes, this was probably the meanest thing I ever said to Alec Sutton, but I never told him I didn’t believe him, that he never saw the Headless Horseman and I was sick of the bullshit with the monsters (my father and I swore around each other by now), so, mean though I was, I never, even then, broke his heart.

 

6. When Shea and I had kids—Murphy and Connor—they were a little more circumspect around Grampy Alec, not as believing of his tall tales, a trait for which I blame their mother, who was always analytical and practical in a way that, for some reason, deeply turned me on (in hindsight, Grampy Alec might have blown his cover early on when he insisted that he saw “a few Pokémons”[note]The conversation afterwards, in which I explained the taxonomy of Pokémon to my father, is and was the most uncomfortable experience of my life, but I had to admire the nearly anthropological curiosity with which he approached the subject.[/note] by the corner store; the eye-rolls produced, in unison, by Murph and Con are still the greatest insults I’ve ever seen).

 

7. This put me in a bit of a bind: you don’t want your kids to think that their old man’s old man is a liar, but you also don’t want to lie to the kids, so you go along with it, much to your wife’s consternation (which later, to her credit, becomes bemusement), but everyone has fun with it, and no one gets too scared.[note]Con was spared the sight of Pennywise the Clown, thanks to his mother’s intervention; she (correctly) pointed out that it would “scare the everloving shit out of him.”[/note]

 

8. I should clarify the word scared: my father’s intention was never to scare me (I never found any rubber snakes or spiders in my bed), and I never was scared (okay, maybe a few times when I was very young, but what child wouldn’t be frightened by the most trustworthy person in their life saying that he had just come from a meeting with the Swamp Thing?)—I think, ultimately, he was just trying to be my friend, to swap stories, to bullshit the way he must have done with Lee Hayward.[note]I should clarify further, because I feel like I’m digging myself a hole: these stories never made me distrust my father.[/note]

 

9. Only once did an actual monster make an appearance, and here’s how it happened: my mother asked if I wanted to take a walk (Red Flag #1: my mother, although a fit woman, never spontaneously took walks) while my father was conspicuously absent (Red Flag #2: my father was never one to leave the house after he had returned to it), so out we went, down Larkspur Court, to the east, and out from the alleyway, why, look what it is, some Monster from Planet X, plainly a hazmat suit from a costume shop accompanied by a latex alien mask (most likely purchased from the selfsame costume shop [Red Flag #3: my father worked around the corner from Herb Crowne’s year-round costume shop]), replete with bulging, purple eyes and mottled gray skin.[note]My father never liked sci-fi, so I’m not sure why he went with this particular outfit as his first; there must have been a sale.[/note]

 

10. My mother mock-screamed and ran away at a pace quick enough for me to catch up to her, which I did as well, once I realized that it was what I was expected to do; I don’t remember my own reaction beyond that, but I really, really hope I played along.[note]My father would never break character and address it, nor would I bring it up, so all I have in this instance is hope that I made him happy.[/note]

 

11. Later, my father’s monsters became upsettingly real, and they announced their presence with beeps and hoarse exhales and the rasp of my mother’s voice, like sandpaper grinding a pearl to dust.[note]Rachel Holcomb Sutton died at the age of 51, and it hurts like a motherfucker to this day.[/note]

 

12. Monsters stopped seeking my father out after that.[note]Truthfully, I started to miss the monsters, and a few weeks after the funeral, I tried telling him I’d seen Pinhead in the frozen food aisle of Kroger’s, but he must have not have heard me because he said nothing.[/note]

 

13. Kids are harder to scare these days, or maybe just harder to impress. Shea and I—she’s gotten in on the act too—have taken to watching DIY tutorials on YouTube, in an attempt to make our own prostheses, or makeup convincing enough to make Murph and Con think that one of us is the real deal.[note]Shea and I never got great at fabricating masks, but I turned out to be something of a wunderkind with the makeup brush, and turned her into a pretty eerie facsimile of the Babadook.[/note] They’re too old to believe us, if they ever did, but that never stopped my father. He came to help us once and was almost immediately flummoxed. He dropped some mask-making impedimenta and looked at me, saying plainly, “Jesus, Jeremiah, I just told you stories.” He shook his head and laughed.

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Interview: Ha Jin

Jin, Ha - Cover of The Boat Rocker     Jin, Ha - cover of A Map of Betrayal     Jin, Ha - cover of Nanjing Requiem

Jin, Ha - cover of A Good Fall     Jin, Ha - cover of The Writer as Migrant     Jin, Ha - cover of Waiting

 

Ha Jin is the author of seven volumes of poetry, four short story collections, eight novels, and one collection of essays, and cowriter of an opera libretto. He is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including a National Book Award, two PEN/Faulkner Awards, the Townsend Prize for Fiction, and the Flanner O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

 

Born Huefei Jin in Liaoning, China, Ha Jin served the People’s Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution from the ages of fourteen to nineteen. Afterward, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in China before coming to the US to study at Brandeis University, where he earned his PhD and began writing poetry. While there, he witnessed the Tiananmen Massacre and decided to remain in the US and eventually to become a citizen.

 

When Jin decided to make his life in the US, he also decided to write in English. As he noted in “Exiled to English” in The New Yorker in 2009, he felt that “the Chinese language had been so polluted by revolutionary movements and political jargon” and that anything he wrote for a Chinese audience would be subject to censorship. Therefore, he chose English, “to preserve the integrity of my work.” Though he still focuses on issues and characters concerned with China, over the more than fifteen years that he has been writing, his English has grown more fluid and natural, and his more recent work is set more solidly in the US.

 

In this interview, we focus on The Boat Rocker, Ha Jin’s most recent novel, published by Pantheon in 2016. The Boat Rocker is the story of Feng Danlin, a Chinese immigrant living in New York and working as a culture reporter and writer of exposés, who sets out to reveal the corrupt network of support around a new highly touted but low-quality novel. It turns out the novel has been penned by none other than his ex-wife, Yan Haili. Needless to say, Danlin’s motives get murky. The book provides an intense, but humorous, look at not only Chinese political corruption, but US publishing shenanigans and the impact of politics even there. As always in Jin’s work, the human struggles with love, envy, and betrayal exist on the same plane as larger cultural and political ones.

 

Lisa Roney for The Florida Review:
One of the things that I wanted to note was that this is only the second time that you’ve set a novel completely in the US. A Free Life, in some ways, reflected your own sudden decision to immigrate to the US after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and now The Boat Rocker‘s main character is a long-term resident, as you are. I just wondered if you could talk a little bit about how your consciousness might have shifted as you, yourself, made your adult life in the US. Do you feel more embedded in life in the US? Do you still think about setting most of your work in China? How are you thinking about place in your work now?

 

Ha Jin:
In recent years, I think I have set my work in between, between the United States and China. In fact, the novel before this is A Map of Betrayal. The narrator is an American history professor. Part of the novel is set in China, but more than half is set in the States. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I wrote a collection of short stories that’s set in Flushing, New York [A Good Fall, Vintage International]. Basically, this is my territory—the in-between.

 

TFR:
I think that seems to be more and more true for more people, as people move all over the world. Even I, who have always lived in the United States, have lived in the North and the South, and there are such distinctions.

 

Jin:
Yes, even within the States, I can see among my students, often, they are in-between, too.

 

TFR:
How do you think that impacts your work in particular, living in between, writing in between?

 

Jin:
I think it really sharpened my sense of survival, because this is a very slippery region, and so I had to be more cautious. Also, it is by definition, marginal. I had to accept that as my condition, a condition for existence as writer, as a human being. A lot of things, I think, I knew, especially I had to figure out by myself. I can’t make a clear statement, because there’s a lot of uncertainty, but uncertainty is a part of the environment, in this space, and so that’s why I had to accept it as my own way. [Laughs]

 

TFR:
Has it changed as you’ve been in the US longer? Do you feel more American now?

 

Jin:
Yeah, I do feel that way, because I’ve been a citizen for almost twenty years now.

 

TFR:
My husband has been a citizen for two.

 

[Laughter]

 

Jin:
For two! From where?

 

TFR:
Canada.

 

Jin:
Canada. Oh, Canada is a great country, but you can have dual citizenship. That’s great. I wish I could. That would make life easier for me—because for me, because China does not accept the dual citizenship, I had to resolve. The door is closed. There’s no way it’d be sane for me to think of going back. There’s no way to go back. I have not been back to China for thirty-one years, ever since I came to the States. That’s the situation. I have to be very rational about this. There’s only this space now, and ahead. There’s no way to go back. It’s very hard for me to think that way.

 

TFR:
One of the things I loved about The Boat Rocker is that there are such great moments of humor in it, too, even as Danlin struggles with this in-between space, as you describe about yourself.

 

Jin:
Yes, I set out to write comically.

 

TFR:
What inspired you to have Danlin’s investigation focused not on just corruption in Chinese cultural life, but also on his ex-wife?

 

Jin:
That would make the project more exciting, more personal. Because, otherwise, it would be just a political investigation. I wanted his motivation, somehow, mixed. There’s an element of vengeance here, and he’s not perfect. He’s traumatized, but, in a way, his motivation is nuanced. That’s why—I wanted this to be more subtle.

 

TFR:
I thought he was a wonderfully complex character. Could you talk a little bit more about your development of him as a character?

 

Jin:
Yes. In fact, a lot of people think this is too bizarre, too far-fetched, but, in fact, for almost every incident here, there is a factual happening. I just unified them and picked them from different places. There were a lot of Chinese, many Chinese men I know, as soon as they arrived here, their wives gave them the divorce papers. I have a friend who was given divorce papers at the airport. There was also a freelance writer, so I combined different people in life to create a character.

 

TFR:
One of the things I was interested in, also, was that sometimes I felt that you do have a certain amount of sympathy for Niya and even Haili. I wonder, do you feel that a fiction writer is obligated to love and sympathize with all of their characters somehow?

 

Jin:
No!

 

[Laughter]

 

No, I don’t agree. Often, even when you are disgusted with a character, people like him or her. I just want to be factual, to see the psychology, the motivations, the situations. I don’t have sympathy for everyone, no. It’s impossible.

 

TFR:
Which is a character here that you have the least sympathy for?

 

Jin:
The wife, Haili, I have the least sympathy. I have more sympathy for Danlin, for Gary, even, because he’s in the dark most of the time. Niya—I can understand her, where she comes from, but she’s really somehow, brainwashed in a way. I can understand them, why they have become like that, but Danlin, I do have a sympathy for him. I can see he’s traumatized. He’s troubled.

 

TFR:
When I was reading all the copy about the book before reading the book itself, it was talking about him as a pure, anti-corruption kind of crusader. I was like, “I don’t think that Ha Jin believes that. I think that there’s much more subtlety to him, even as he takes up this position of investigating his ex-wife.”

 

Jin:
He just got into it emotionally, couldn’t get out, and just got deeper and deeper, and was in a way trapped in there.

 

TFR:
You deal mostly with corruption in government and culture affairs kinds of offices, but you also, especially in chapter four, you satirize the publishing world a bit. What do you think are the biggest problems in the publishing world today?

 

Jin:
I have a lot of sympathy for publishers. Firstly, they are businesspeople. When they publish a book, they have to think of a market, otherwise their argument is, if you’re a new author, why should I waste money, lose money on you? I do have sympathy for that. But, it really is a business world. They don’t care too much about literary merit at all. I had the experience that my first few fiction books were all published by small presses. At the time, I got a lot of rejection letters. They would say, “We like it. This well-written, but it’s too poetic, but it’s very good. I remember episodes and characters—they stay with me, but we don’t have a market. We can’t see a market for it.” In a way, sometimes publishers are near-sighted, I think. They think too much in profits. A lot of books—you don’t know. They might yet have a different life once in print.

 

TFR:
How do you see that influencing our literature?

 

Jin:
That’s why commerce, the business part, is really not about good literature. I think that there should be some kind of balance. Some publishers have been doing this—they have a special series. Even if they know they might lose money, it still is good for the press. In the long run, we don’t know what a book may do—maybe the press will benefit in the long run. Like New Directions—basically, they’re still supported by the early high-modern poets [who never made money in their time].

 

TFR:
You’re a teacher as well as a writer, and I wonder if you could comment about creative writing programs. There’s been so much criticism about how “writing can’t be taught” and all of that, though I think there’s also the matter of cultivating a readership, which we do through our teaching of creative writing.

 

Jin:
I think it’s a democratic thing. In the book, I talk about the Chinese literary operators. You have to really tow a line with the officials, you have to be very active, accepted by the powers that be. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have a chance. At least the creative writing programs are open. It’s open to everyone. We give people an equal chance.

 

People elsewhere may think of faculty like literary agents—this was new to many other countries. I think they, in fact, compare MFAs with other, more commercial aspects. MFA programs have done much for aspiring writers. But we don’t take money personally. We don’t benefit. We don’t get a commission from it.

 

[Laughter]

 

TFR:
You commented in your Paris Review interview in 2009 that you are open and outspoken, and that’s certainly something that I have long admired about both your work and about your reputation as a person. Why are these traits that you’ve cultivated, and in what ways do you think they’re important in addition to, obviously, allowing you to speak out about political corruption?

 

Jin:
As human beings, we must find some basic principles that we must go by. For instance, consistency, integrity. These are very basic principles. Otherwise, how can we act in the world? We might just get lost in our own confusion. That’s why I believe in speaking about the Tiananmen Massacre, ever since it happened. I have to keep on, continue it. I can’t cancel myself. I can’t go back on it.

 

TFR:
What does your knowledge of and experience of Chinese situations make you think about what’s going on in the US today?

 

Jin:
I think, really, China has been very aggressive in recent years. In fact, this novel is set twelve years before now, and so, at the time, China was very cautious, but China, because of the crisis in 2008, China has done well. In fact, even developed. That gives some kind of legitimacy, or justification, to the system. Basically, they’re trying to, now, denigrate democracy. The new election—basically, I think China is very happy about the results, because Trump is a businessman and has business dealings with China. The Chinese side—I think they believe he can somehow have more influence.

 

TFR:
Do you think that your writing will go in a direction where it approaches American politics in addition to Chinese and Chinese-American politics?

 

Jin:
Maybe in the future. I’m not sure. [Laughter] I’m not a political writer. That’s another reason I’ve written this—because I really wanted to make the subject personal.

 

TFR:
What else would you like to say about The Boat Rocker? What else was important to you about the writing of The Boat Rocker, and how does it mark the next step for you? Where are you going next?

 

Jin:
Stylistically, it’s different from my previous novels, because I wanted to make this somehow comic.

 

TFR:
Which it was.

 

Jin:
That was the challenge to me. Basically, I want to be serious, but at the same time entertaining. That’s my ambition.

 

TFR:
Great, and any news about what’s next? Are you working on a new project?

 

Jin:
My wife was sick, gravely sick for some years—she’s well now, but I couldn’t pounce into a long novel project. So, I’ve been writing a lot of poetry in Chinese. I published two books of poems in Chinese, and then I re-wrote some of the poems in English, so basically I have a book of English-language poems I’ve been working on. [A Distant Center, Copper Canyon Press, 2018].

 

TFR:
I wish we had another hour to talk about poetry.

 

Jin:

Yes.

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Fantastic Voyage

My father’s silver Chevette pushes past refineries along the turnpike,
fields and farmland tucked back behind the Raritan River bridge.

 

I strain my neck to catch glimpses of skyline, growing larger
with each exit. I mouth exotic names on signs—Rahway, Weehawken.

 

We begin the long, slow, curving descent to the mouth of the tunnel,
an impatient caterpillar of cars with glowing red eyes, inching

 

towards a collective cocoon. At the entrance we pick up speed, my pulse
quickens in the half-light. Everything’s possible below the surface:

 

 The white-tiled walls are relics from an ancient civilization.
 The curve of the ceiling is the belly of a massive river-beast.
 We are passing through a half-world on the way to a new planet,
 the invisible NJ/NY line is a strobe-light stargate.

 

The road twists, slopes upward—leaning in, we slingshot forward,
there’s no turning back: the glow of the City is just around the bend.

 

The cocoon splits open and spits us all out: fresh butterflies, bright wings.
Drenched in golden light, the City’s an endless meadow to flit about.

 

We bury our faces in it, we drink its nectar.

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Standoff

It was February, mid-afternoon and sunny, but the wind was blowing, and the sun wasn’t doing enough of what I needed it to do: smother the chill, whisper something warm in my ear, something about spring and starting over. I was back in my hometown, about an hour’s drive west of Philly, after thirty years away—kids in college, a divorce in the offing. The world thinks Pottstown is the kind of place people go to, or get stuck in, when they have limited options, the kind of place abandoned once upon a time by Bethlehem Steel, Firestone Tires, Mrs. Smith’s Pies, me, and people like me, the ones who went to college and didn’t come back. Until they did.

 

I was across town at the local radio station when I first heard about the standoff a couple of blocks from my house, and I got into my car and headed toward it. It wasn’t the first time I’d run toward confrontation. I was the tomboy who picked fights with the older boys, and for as long as I can remember I’ve also needed to know what was going on around me, what I myself might be up against. As I approached the area, I squeezed into an open parking spot on the street. In the rear view mirror I saw people standing on the corners behind me, just one long block from the SWAT truck and police vehicles stationed in front of the three-story, brick apartment building where all this was going down. I heard a series of bangs then, and something inside me stiffened. They sounded like gunshots, a sound I’d heard throughout my childhood as my dad test-fired weapons in his gun shop in our backyard in a residential neighborhood not far from where I now sat; he was a full-time German teacher then and a part-time gunsmith. I waited a few seconds. It was quiet, and I figured it must have been tear gas or something like that. The cops wouldn’t let all these people get that close if they could get hit by a stray bullet, right? So, I got out of the car.

 

I went up to a man and woman on the closest corner and asked what was going on. The woman was young, maybe in her twenties; she looked like she might have Down syndrome. She let the young man do all the talking, and he told me what I already knew: there was an armed man holed up in the Logan Court apartments. He’d been in a standoff with the police since that morning. I got the impression that they themselves had been there for hours. They weren’t holding hands. I don’t think their arms were even touching, but there they were, together, like sentries. They turned away from me and continued their vigil, staring ahead. My eyes followed. A SWAT team was poised behind an armored truck, which began to move, slowly turning and facing the apartment building head-on. A police car was nearby with officers hunched over the hood, weapons trained on the building.

 

On our corner a man in a navy work jacket and thick glasses arrived, along with a woman with reddish hair and crow’s feet. At first I took her to be his wife, something about the way she corrected him several times, the implications of ownership, how we’re allowed to do that to those closest to us, or how we slide into it, one person doing it, the other person accepting it. He was wearing a cap, though, so it was hard to discern his age and, at some point, it occurred to me that they could also be mother and son. Apparently, they lived in the building that was under siege—Building B—and they knew the gunman. He was their neighbor, Albert. They put him at about seventy years old with an arsenal in there.

 

Just the word—arsenal—made me think of the weapons that have always been a part of my dad’s life and our family’s life when I was young—his guns, his customers’ guns, the metal cases of ammo. All that firepower, all that just plain power, amassed to defend against “it,” my dad’s continued reference to some sort of anticipated invasion or revolution, the parameters of which seemed to change with the times. During my father’s childhood, the enemy was the German army, when all Americans were alert to the possibility of U-boats just off the coast. During my childhood in the ’60s and ’70s, the revolution might have involved black militants attempting to overthrow “decent” white society. During the Clinton administration, to my father “it” meant the U.S. government trying to take arms from its own citizens, in which case secret militias and individuals like him would have to fight it out in the streets against their own government. Or “it” might have meant the United Nations’ stripping sovereign nations of their military authority, forcing people like my father to defend themselves against an armed international agency. And in a post-9/11 world, “it” might be the “foreign” terrorists among us, or again, “lawless” black and Latino gangs, venturing from their cities to attack law-abiding citizens in the suburbs. I didn’t understand or agree with him on any of this—the fearsome “it” always haunting my father.

 

There at the standoff, a small amount of clear drool trickled from the left corner of the man’s mouth—the man in the navy work jacket—as he described some kind of metal framing around Albert’s doorway so no one could see inside his unit. I couldn’t really picture it, but I felt a sense of impingement, started to imagine Albert as a secretive, paranoid type who barely cracked his door open when anyone was in the hallway, and then I became aware of the way the bone cold of the pavement sent a chill all the way through me. I hadn’t planned on being outside for any length of time that afternoon. I hadn’t planned on being at a standoff. The man did not wipe away his drool, and I wondered if he was cold, too, or if his mouth was numb from dental work. He kind of talked like that. He mentioned that he had seen the police arrive that morning, but then he had to go to school. He would mention that again, a couple more times, while we’re all standing there—how he goes to school. At first, I assumed he meant college, but then I didn’t know. I mean, he never really said what kind of school.

 

Another neighbor joined us then. She was petite. Her hair was dark brown, dyed, and teased. Her teeth were bad. She was just a little thing, but she talked tough. She had a smoker’s voice and she was smoking as she talked. Every movement was quick and sharp. Inhale. Exhale. Her beady eyes darted here and there like a nervous bird’s. Puff. Puff. Apparently, Albert had had previous altercations with the building manager.

 

“That manager has got to go,” said Bird Woman. “This is ridiculous.”

 

It was implied, and the others murmured in agreement, that the building manager didn’t deal well with people, that things had been known to go missing from people’s apartments, that maybe he was partly responsible for Albert’s behavior. Not that anyone should ever shoot at someone else, but … still. The consensus of the group was that this was a waste of their tax dollars. Then, they turned on a dog. Apparently, a dog might have been at the root of it. Someone’s dog in their building. It would start barking early in the morning and it wouldn’t shut up. Albert got mad, complained to the manager, an argument ensued and escalated to the point where Albert shot a hole through his own door and the manager’s door across the hall. Supposedly, the shot through the doors did happen that morning, but it wasn’t clear to me if the dog’s barking was the actual inciting incident that morning, or if the current standoff was being conflated with other annoying, dog-barking episodes, arguments, and slammed doors.

 

It hit me then that I was in the midst of a self-selected society, or at least a subset of the self-selected society of the Logan Court Apartments, Building B, and they were letting me, a stranger, in on the particulars of their lives there, some of the comings and goings, the things they knew, or thought they knew, about Albert and the manager, the way a doorway was constructed, the way we can or can’t see inside people’s lives, the mystery of it all. This was what people did in times of crisis: huddle on the sidewalk and squint into a weak winter sun and try to make sense of it, worry about what might have been, the what-ifs. I definitely felt like an outsider. Or maybe I was dissociating in that moment. Maybe I was still too good at that, and that was why I felt this wasn’t really happening to me, except to the extent that I had grown up in this town and felt a kind of ownership of it; or to the extent that I had moved back in midlife and could see the back of Building B from the alley behind my rented house, where I parked my car; or to the extent that gun violence seemed to be a fact of life in these United States.

 

“It’s a yappy dog,” said Bird Woman. “A REAL yappy dog.” Puff. Puff.

 

Everyone nodded in agreement.

 

One of Bird Woman’s fingers was bleeding. When she swiped at her hair, she smeared blood across her right temple, a macabre kind of make-up. She was aware of the bleeding finger and periodically dabbed it against her coat, but none of us told her about the blood now on her face.

 

Down the street, the SWAT truck changed its position. The lid at the top lifted up and someone poked his head out. Men outside the truck moved as the truck moved, using it as a shield. The tank rolled slowly up over the curb and onto the grass, heading straight toward the building.  I couldn’t actually see the tank’s point of contact with the building, but it seemed to be backing up and going forward a few times, as though it were battering its way into the building. I wondered if everyone else was out of the building, and how the police could batter it without causing structural damage, and whether they were going to demolish the entire building just to get to Albert?

 

“How do they know if Albert is still in his unit?” I asked. “Could he move through the hallways, up the stairs, and shoot his way into another apartment?”

 

I was thinking he’d then have a sniper-perch from a second-floor window, in which case, we were all easy prey, just a couple hundred yards away. Just as I needed to be aware of my surroundings, I sometimes thought about the speed and paths and trajectories of bullets.

 

“Nah, there were cops in the stairwells this morning. He can’t move,” said the man who drooled and went to school.

 

It welled up in me then, unbidden, the memory of the mental fortress of my childhood, the feeling that someone was out to get us, our family, our dad, me, and it came to rest on Albert, the sense of his being trapped, pinned down by the police, a militia. Was this Albert’s “it?” Who did he think he was fighting right now? What did he think they were trying to take from him or do to him? If we could have looked out Albert’s window, through Albert’s eyes, what would we have seen? The police or someone else or some sort of monster? If he had, indeed, exchanged gunfire with police, then he must have had a death-wish. And I was struck again: He would not come out of there alive. When you got to that point, the point where Albert was at just then, how could you give up? How could you make it stop, the narrative running through your head, the one where the whole world is against you and right outside your window, pressing in, battering their way in? And let us be honest: Your manhood is at stake. Yours versus the guys’ in uniform, the ones who have rolled in their military vehicles to bring Albert to his knees.

 

Another woman joined the makeshift community on the corner, these partial witnesses, who lived up close to Albert, and me, the interloper, the eavesdropper. This woman’s elderly aunt lived in Building B and she didn’t know if she had been evacuated or where she was. She didn’t think her aunt would be able to handle this; it was too much.

 

At the radio station I’d just been interviewed about my new job as the executive director of a small, nonprofit, community land trust, albeit part-time, ten hours a week. I was between things then, without knowing what the next thing was, only the ones that were over: a long marriage, child-rearing, the silences, the words holed up in my head, trying to shoot their way out. The land trust’s first project was to build a community garden right in the middle of what was supposedly Pottstown’s most-troubled neighborhood—historically occupied by African-Americans in what was overwhelmingly rental housing, much of it subsidized, much of it rundown, in what had been the arena for a drug turf war during 2010 that had resulted in several shootings. Now here was this standoff taking place in the North End of town in 2012. This kind of thing wasn’t supposed to happen here, where the white people lived, and it became a repeated refrain of the standoff audience: “I moved to that apartment [or this part of town] because I thought it was safe.”

 

They seemed to have forgotten about the armed robbery four months earlier and, literally, two blocks from where we were standing. The cashier at the Turkey Hill Minit Market was robbed at gunpoint the prior fall just after midnight. The police were on a stakeout—there’d been a rash of late-night, armed robberies of area Turkey Hills and other all-night convenience stores—and the police saw this one unfold. An African-American male with a white t-shirt over his head pointed what looked to be a handgun at the clerk. As the robber left the store, they told him to stop and drop the gun. He turned toward them, and they fired. It sounded very Wild West to me. The robber was struck in the leg, but managed to get away, leaving behind what was actually a BB gun. The police couldn’t find him for several hours. They roped off the street in front of my house. Helicopters with searchlights hovered overhead around 5:00 a.m., when he was finally located, bleeding, in the Presbyterian church one block over. I slept through the whole thing; sleep has always been my release.

 

These neighbors didn’t mention the Turkey Hill shooting, and now we all stood, voluntarily and in broad daylight, as close to danger as we were allowed to get, to men in uniforms with guns drawn, to a man with a gun or guns, who had snapped. There was no getting away from it, no neighborhood you could live in and get away from it. Well, no, I take that back. I knew there were places where money still insulated their residents from poverty and the rumbling aftershocks of poverty. I had lived in those places for thirty years. Anyway, you couldn’t get away from guns and violence in a place like Pottstown, couldn’t pretend it didn’t concern you. And, after all, there was danger all around, everywhere, not all of it having to do with guns. Most people don’t want to admit that. If you really thought about it, if you really faced up to it, how could you even get out of bed? How could you leave your house? To go to work, say, if you’re a woman. To be a person of color or an immigrant or someone who wears a hijab or a turban. For that matter, in a lot of cases, how could you stay in your house? You know what I mean. You go to enough memoir workshops, you teach enough adolescents, you listen to enough people talk about their lives, their childhoods, their parents, their partners, you really listen, you allow for the possibility of violence, and you begin to see what I mean. You read the newspaper, you read between the lines, you think back, you remember—you have to remember—if you do not want to remember what it was like to be a child, to interpret the world for the first time—your parents, other adults, other kids, the systems at work. If you do not want to remember what it was like to not know how they worked, what it was like to not know the rules, and the moment you started making one assumption or another, one interpretation or another, then, of course, you are not going to begin to see what I mean. There’s not much this story, or any story, can do for a person like that. You have to allow for the possibility.

 

At first, I thought it was mainly girls and women who were in danger in the world, and maybe that’s true enough anyway. Now, though, when I think about someone like Albert, I think about my father. I think about a little boy who was once in danger. I didn’t know who put Albert there, in Building B, surrounded, guns trained on him on February 9, 2012. I didn’t know if it was someone inside his house, someone outside his house. I’m talking about when he was a boy. So, of course, we can’t always know, because they don’t always know—someone like Albert, in Albert’s position during that standoff—and they’re the only ones who could tell us, but only if they know and, then, only if they want to tell.

—

Here’s a story: A six- or seven-year-old boy has to go down the street along the railroad tracks and around the corner into the firehouse to tell his dad to stop drinking and playing cards; it’s time to come home. One time he watches as the ambulance takes his dad away; he’s had so much to drink, he’s got the DTs. That’s how my dad put it when he told me this story a few years ago, around the time of the standoff. So many times my father has erased the stories of his father’s sometimes violent alcoholism with one line: “He was a good man.” Yes, in some ways I’m sure he was. And he drank too much, and he hit you, and you stuttered, and you pointed a loaded gun at him when you were sixteen and he’d been drinking and was coming after you, and he left you alone after that. And you’ve surrounded yourself with guns ever since. He was a flawed man, like the rest of us, and you loved him, like I love you.

 

“So,” I said to him after he told this particular story, “Your mom sends you out to bring your drunk father home on a regular basis. You watch your dad seizing up. You were just a little kid. We call that trauma, Dad.”

 

The blank look, then a shift, something coming into his eyes. My dad is not stupid. He is a reader and a storyteller with a beautiful singing voice. He is friendly and generous; his former students, relatives, and customers seek his counsel. He is really quite perceptive, but I could tell this was a whole new way of seeing the world, himself: vulnerable, trusting, the child he was before he ever had to look at his father in that condition, before he had to start making calculations about his own safety. His father’s steps heavy on the staircase leading up to his attic bedroom. Where is Richard? Where is he? This is what I mean about remembering, about wanting to remember. But in the end, how much does he want me to know or tell? He has told his stories to me out of order, and since they didn’t happen to me, I can be something of an editor and put them back in order and draw my own conclusions. Your father. Coming at you. The enormity of it. The stated enemies may have changed over the decades, but I can’t help but believe that my dad has armed himself his whole life for a standoff with his father, the real ones and all of the imagined ones.

 

We already know that domestic violence begets domestic violence, like sexual abuse and substance abuse, cycling through generations until it is consciously broken. And we are now learning of the correlation between domestic violence and mass shootings. I understand that my attempt to understand someone like Albert—and my father—makes me susceptible to accusations of pandering to white males, to giving them special dispensation perhaps because of mental illness, to accounting for their fragility. But I am not saying that Albert, or anyone who takes up arms against fellow citizens or the police, should get any special treatment in the moment or after the fact. I am not talking about letting them off the hook for their actions as adults. I’m talking about preventing them from being harmed in the first place, from feeling the need to pick up a gun and aim it at innocents, as if that will avenge the original harm. Or from feeling the need to own an arsenal, as if that will prevent additional harm. My grandfather has been dead for more than fifty years; he’s not coming for my dad ever again. And so, I wondered, and still wonder: What about Albert? All the Alberts? All the white men with guns? What to do about them? And more specifically, what to do about them when they are boys? People are mysteries, will always be mysteries, every single one of them, but I can’t let go of the notion that there are clues. There are always clues.

—

Before I left the standoff—I didn’t see how my waiting there in the cold meant anything—I ran into the Borough Council president and his wife, who lived on the block where we had all gathered.

 

“Congratulations on the new job,” he said. “I caught the tail end of your interview.” And then he said something like, “Thanks for moving back. It’s good to have you here.” The way he said it made it sound like he was referring to right then, at the standoff. You know, like he was glad there was, perhaps, a kind of outsider to be a witness. He knew I’d been gone for thirty years, knew I’d become the town’s cheerleader on a town blog I’d created, knew I’d been volunteering in several capacities. What he could not have known was that these gigs were a limbo for me— my own standoff with the things closing in on me: middle age and the whole of my childhood, the need to make meaning, to make sense of the past before I could make some new future.

—

In the end Albert did give in. The paper said his full name was Albert J. Dudanowicz. He wasn’t seventy; he was fifty-six, not much older than I was at the time. He had shot through the manager’s door, but there was nothing about the yappy dog, nothing about Albert’s mental state. It turned out there was no arsenal either, although he had a .50-caliber Smith and Wesson five-shot pistol and a Remington .375 H & H bolt-action rifle, which was powerful enough to kill an elephant, according to the paper. It was reported that he was bleeding from one hand, where a sniper had hit him. The photo in the paper showed a burly white man, alive, walking, unshaven, his chest naked, massive spotlights shining on him, darkness around the edges.

 

Three weeks later, a local reporter pelted Albert with questions in an online video taken as he left a hearing.

 

“Albert, do you have anything to say?” she asked. “You want to apologize? Why’d you shoot at those police officers that day? You’re not sorry? Why wouldn’t you come out of your apartment? No apology? You’re not going to apologize?”

 

Rat-a-tat-tat. She sprayed him with questions.

 

Albert’s beard was full then. His right hand was heavily bandaged. He shuffled from the chains around his ankles. His eyes didn’t seem to see, and then he cast them downward. At first, he whimpered, and it was high-pitched, until all the whimpers started running together, animal-like and wounded.

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City of Cobwebs

City of Cobwebs is an interactive narrative built using the open source tool Twine. It tells the story of a person wandering a city, in search of his/her sister.

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A hose outside a house in a suburban backyard

My brother has always had a knack for crafting memorable metaphors from complex ideas. He tells me this one about my mother’s Adult-onset Leukodystrophy—the disease then in its earliest, most unnoticeable stage—when I am young, maybe eight, and I remember it forever.

 

The myelin sheath is a greatly extended and modified plasma membrane wrapped around the nerve axon in a spiral fashion. Picture it as a hose.

 

A hose outside a house in a suburban backyard. Imagine the hose is green; the yard, too. At the crank of a wrist, fresh, clean water sprints up from the property’s subsystem, glides through the casing, and pours itself into place effortlessly. Prior to appearing at the spout, water is an unthought. The ground drinks up. Grass and flowers flourish.

 

But eventually, the hose begins to peel; its vibrant green wears. Yes, all hoses deteriorate over time, but this one specifically has a certain defect that makes it deteriorate faster.

 

Are you following?

 

Deterioration. A hundred holes leak fresh, clean water. There is nothing wrong with the water, it just doesn’t get to the spout and therefore the grass.

 

. . . so the myelin sheath is like the hose, right, and Mom’s neurotransmitters—or the messages from her brain—are like the water that’s supposed to flow through the hose and arrive at the grass, except it keeps leaking out. Does that make sense?

 

 

I remember this. I repeat it and relay it to a select few throughout my childhood: a best friend, a teammate, and once a grade-school teacher I shouldn’t have told. It spilled out how lies do, nervous and quick.

 

Signed proof by a parent that I had done my homework—that was the hurdle I was trying to clear when my tongue tripped me up and I went down a precocious-sounding rabbit hole on the intricacies of the Leukodystrophy and the function of the myelin sheath.  I was in fifth grade and had forged my mom’s signature, something I’d done tens of times before and never felt bad about. It was a ridiculous requirement. Of course I had done my homework, it was right there in my handwriting. Why all the extra red tape?

 

The overbearing administrative aspects of school irritated me and my mom both. When she first learned of the new nightly oath demanded from her, she flippantly filled four weeks of pages at once with her initials. My teacher, Mr. Smith, took notice of this when he looked through my assignment book the next day and sent a snarky note home explaining to her how that wasn’t the point of the exercise and if she could please just cooperate and sign nightly, that’d be great. Instead, my Mom, a teacher herself, and I, a rambunctious but nonetheless A-student, entered into a kind of low-key rebellion together: she taught me to forge her signature.

 

With practice, she coached me on the rounded curve of a capital n and taught me how to loop a lowercase y. She handed me an interest in untangling letters and an attraction for working them back together. Excavated from this experience were my first small associations of art with pen and of pen with protest. Why sign on the dotted line when you can sign through it? By now, I have written my mother’s name a thousand times; it is an act of love. Still, I practice it.

 

For months, the forging was a non-issue until suddenly it was. Mr. Smith was intimidating and I was ten. His voice boomed when he yelled, and I knew he just didn’t like me. I had a propensity for talking without raising my hand, shirking the rules, and just kind of being a high maintenance student in general. He must have been waiting for a reason to let me have it. So, one day in early spring when I routinely handed in my homework and showed him my assignment book that held an unusually messy—and of course forged—signature (I had fallen into the sloppy trap of comfort), he challenged its validity.  I froze.

 

He asked if it was my mom’s signature: Yes that’s it wasn’t enough to appease him. Then he asked again. And again, giving me that look that told me he just knew, and I, feeling as if I had nowhere else to go, mumbled down a path about my mom having Leukodystrophy, which made it so her handwriting was sometimes poor. At that, his voice and eyebrows rose and he said Leuko-what? There was no turning back. I picked up speed: Yeah it’s because of neurotransmitters and this thing the myelin sheath . . . We all have it, but hers is deteriorating . . . So it’s like a hose, right . . .

 

I went through the whole metaphor.

 

He was disarmed out of confusion and let the challenge go, but I held onto it for weeks, angry at myself in cycles for letting out secrets I knew not to under the slightest, most selfish pressure; for betraying my family’s trust. See, my mom worked as a teacher in the same school district, and while her condition was only just beginning to show in brief, elusive bouts, we were explicitly told to never, ever discuss it with anyone.

 

For weeks I waited nervously for the moment I’d be found out. I imagined my mom waiting for me when I arrived home, arms folded in disappointment, or maybe it would come through in the form of a call during dinnertime from Mr. Smith or an administrator to my father: Mr. Chen? Yes, we’re calling about Mrs. Chen’s Leukodystrophy. We know all about it.

 

And then what exactly would happen? I didn’t know for sure, I just worried about it happening at all. Later, I learned that my parents were concerned my mom wouldn’t get tenured if the district knew she had a neurodegenerative disease. We were all on her insurance.

 

The anxieties of secrecy root inward early and become near-impossible to purge. In fifth grade, I not only knew what the myelin sheath was, but I had been disappointed with myself for talking about it with the wrong person and worried about who might find out that I spilled the beans. Some grade-school gossip that was.

 

Weeks after the event, I would finally find relief. I arrived home on a Friday, hands full of dandelions.

 

Put your weeds down, will ya? Hurry up and come inside. It was my brother, waiting for me on the front steps. I couldn’t understand how a flower so perfectly bright could count as a weed, but before I could defend the wrongfully categorized, he ushered me inside quick.  Mom and Dad have big news!

 

Inside, the sun-filled kitchen felt as light as the outdoors actually was. There was a pitcher of lemonade on the table and an already-dug-into plate of cheese and crackers. The whole family sat down in our unofficial spots on the big white cornered couch in the living room where we always had important conversations. Usually it was where I was spoken to when in trouble. In that moment, despite the mounting anxiety of Mr. Smith and the myelin sheath, I knew I wasn’t. Finally, my dad spoke: he was quitting his job up in New York and taking a shot at starting his own business around town. This was huge news.

 

I now realize it was less about business, and more about being home for Mom—for us—as the Leukodystrophy progressed, but at the time, we were all elated nonetheless. To be home together as a family.

 

Oftentimes, the only way to rid oneself of a big anxiety is to occupy oneself with a bigger excitement. From that moment, I never worried about Mr. Smith again.

 

Life felt new. I forgot my mishaps and forgave myself. Summer arrived. All July and August that year, in the evenings, Mom and Dad drank wine on the deck—or in the garage if there was a thunderstorm on. Jesse and I indulged in endless cheese-and-cracker plates and got along. On the best days, we’d connect the garden hose to the sprinkler and run through over and over again, not once thinking about a disease of any kind. Sometimes, we’d chalk the entire driveway. Sunflowers, hopscotch, the usual. Once, I covered the entire front steps with my mother’s name, a hundred perfect signatures. When my masterpiece was finally complete, I called her to come see. Look, Mom, I can really write your name perfectly now.

 

It’s great, sweetheart, she replied, now let me see you write yours.

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Nomads

In the night sky, Arabs see al’awa’id,

the Mother Camels, a pattern of stars

that seem to gather around a calf

and protect her from hyenas.

 

In the life before this one, daughter,

I might have carried you for just over a year,

and delivered you to your first slow,

searing desert breaths.

 

The camel mare is the only mammal

who does not clean her infant

after birth, nor bite through the umbilical cord.

 

Another cord binds me to you;

it runs from brainstem

to lumbar region, with nerve roots,

dorsal roots, ventral roots,

 

the peripheral butterfly columns,

and the cauda equine (horse’s tail),

motor supply for the perineum

that brought you into light in late

September, a desert sunflower,

 

your eyes dolly-blue, to gift me

my happiest autumn.

 

A calf is born with eyes open.

Did you know camels always face the sun?

 

Their lovely long eyelashes

and their tears protect their eyes

from sand and grit and blindness.

 

We were nomads, in that other life;

maybe that is why I do not see you

as much as I would like, but we are bound

to each other nonetheless.

 

You’ll find me waiting in al’awa’id

even at the dawn of my next life.

 

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Conjuring Gossamer Ghosts

House of McQueen, by Valerie Wallace

Four Way Books, 2018

66 pages, paper, $15.95

Winner, Four Way Books Intro Prize

 

cover of House of McQueen by Valerie Wallace

 

When I was seventeen, big-haired and blonde in 1980s Texas, I was invited to walk in a fashion show with other members of my high school drill team. We were cheap labor, and the local bridal and prom store needed pretty girls to parade the latest Gunne Sax gowns for a hospital fundraiser. Looking back, I’m embarrassed. The fashion was about as forward as our mall’s food court. Still, there was drama in it. A girl could imagine a bolder version of herself under all that lace, pouf, and pantyhose. I have since discarded the excesses of that era but hold on to a few prom dresses and the feeling of being transformed by fashion. I inhabit other personas on the page now and indulge in only the occasional Vogue, but I’m aware that the industry remains a tough club to break into. Occasionally, someone unexpected breaks in and ruffles fashion’s feathers. In the 1990s, that someone was a young, English, working-class dropout named Alexander McQueen. This is all one needs to know to gain entry to poet Valerie Wallace’s House of McQueen, a debut collection of equally startling poems about the famed designer.

 

Wallace—who teaches with the City Colleges of Chicago and works for the project Virtue, Happiness & The Meaning of Life at the University of Chicago—presents her book as this spring’s couture collection. There are so many different lines of entry into these poems: via fabric, gender, fairytale, class, and especially the life of the singular man. In “Autobiography of Alexander McQueen,” the poet gives voice to this man directly:

I’m trying to weave a new fabric, but the loom doesn’t exist.

 

Born in 1969, McQueen was the youngest child in a large family who quit school to apprentice at tailoring on Saville Row. Lee, as he was known to friends, had talent, and it gained him entrance to fashion school, where he caught the eye of influential doyennes and a voyeuristic, image-saturated society. At times Wallace lets the designer himself write the poems, taking phrases from his interviews and playing with form and function. “Joyce & Lee” is a touching erasure poem from a conversation between the designer and his mother.

 

Rumored to have been abused by a brother-in-law, whom he later witnessed brutally beat his sister, McQueen said he wanted people to “be afraid” of women wearing his designs. One can feel the fear in “Charmed for Protection”:

 

Hood be cowled     for private thoughts

Sleeves be lined    for smell of Night

Let none harm you   Let none betray you

Wrap yourself in no Spektral affliction

Your Wound    your strength    Wild   wanted

 

This air of fantasy is augmented by the fact that these poems take place across the pond in England, which itself lends an air of fantasy for American readers—it is the birthplace of so many of our fairy tales. Skillfully woven throughout the collection is thematic, mythical imagery also seen in McQueen’s collections, especially birds and mirrors. From “McQueen’s Bop with the Interviewer”:

 

Waif who needs rescuing

isn’t romance.

I’ve seen naivete

I know what can happen.

Someone’s life is burning

from this world’s brutal kiss.

I am │ you are

The voyeur  the mirror.

 

The poems, however, never lose touch with the real world. Within Wallace’s skillfully crafted poems we are in school, under the presser foot, discarded on the shop floor, almost literally threaded through the poems. “Bumsters,” for instance, virtually unzips down the page. “McQueen Linen” cleverly plays with white space and columns to mimic linen’s loose weave. The poet’s shrewd use of form means we arrive at the man through his medium. Wallace gives this poem space to breathe, and it can be approached either horizontally or vertically to elicit different meanings:

 

I design the shows      as stills If you look they tell    the whole story

 

When I find                I’ve      no place for fear          I show myself

 

The body’s                  tried to tell you            it’s intricate     altered

 

Perimeter                     what I see        our bodies’      silver / dream

 

In “[When staggering down the runway wearing tartan over torn lace],” the reader is even thrust into one of his radical shows:

 

When stocks edged with a Stuart ruff enclose the neck

When obsolete colors, fulwe, sad, vernal, watchet

When sleeveless torn satin & cutaway shorts

When strewn with cigarette butts

When a buried history of England & Scotland

When a man yelling, Have I offended you then?

When the body becomes everything it is given

Throughout, the poems evoke experience, putting the reader into experiences otherwise inaccessible.

 

The language that Wallace sometimes uses likewise may be unfamiliar (pronk, skirr, chthonic)—made up or resurrected in a way that puts the reader in a strange and different realm. In addition, the poet revels in trying on a variety of forms, including contemporary free verse, slant sonnets and rhymes, shape poems, lists, acrostics and more. The poems also draw on an array of sources, from interviews, articles, biographies, and McQueen’s own words. As a collection of new fashions, where every stitch and fabric can be examined, this collection of poems reveals many details that merit scrutiny, study, contemplation. Alexander McQueen himself was mysterious in life and even more so since his death—and, like her subject, Wallace’s work is not easily accessible. Beauty does not so much blossom here as blur. These are studied poems by an accomplished poet for a reader wanting more.

 

At times the book feels like an intense research project into the man, except the traditional roles of male artist (albeit gay in this instance) and female muse are reversed. It is terribly exciting to read a series of poems about a man observed and interpreted by a woman, about sexualities that openly defy bifurcated norms. The reversal (maybe even obfuscation) elicits new avenues of exploring and questioning gender roles in fashion as well as poetry, and I can only hope that both worlds will make room for more of that.

 

The collection comes at an important time for both English and American audiences following Brexit and the election of President Trump. Wallace’s poems hold up a mirror to the reader, daring us to feel disgust or delight, to challenge the status quo. This is not unlike one of McQueen’s most talked about show stunts for his collection Voss, where the audience was forced to stare at their own reflections from a giant, mirrored runway box whose walls dropped—after an uncomfortable hour—to reveal his models inside a makeshift psychiatric hospital. The poems are likewise in turns beautiful and confrontational and sometimes both at once.

 

I finished this collection feeling like a fortunate grown-up guest at Fashion Week, sitting stunned beside Anna Wintour in a front-row seat, thinking about how far I traveled to get there. Alexander McQueen’s tragic death in 2010 means the designer is not alive to see his portrait painted on Wallace’s page, but House of McQueen is an artistic, imagined collaboration worthy of our attention. Readers will leave swaggered.

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Intervals

Matt builds makeshift bridges across creeks in the woods behind his house. He takes bush axes and handsaws to cut down small trees standing in the way of his new bike paths. Sometimes he brings lighter fluid and gas station cigarette lighters when he needs to kick the demolition up a notch. He can’t stand school, studying, or too much time indoors. He thought about playing football, but he’s not looking for any kind of afterschool prison-yard where a bunch of men his dad’s age bark orders and blow whistles all day, even if he does know a few kids on the team. He’s got a lot to do and can’t be bothered with others’ demands.

 

At night, Matt’s sister Mallory studies through her tears. She weeps into the wee small hours over her US History AP notes, memorizing details next to names like Henry Clay and Cotton Mather, and phrases like “The Monroe Doctrine” and “Manifest Destiny.” She traces the names and phrases with an orange highlighter, their definitions in yellow. The ones she can’t remember after three tries, she underlines with a purple highlighter. She works at the bar in the kitchen, her books and notebooks spread everywhere, and all the lights on like no one in the house is trying to sleep. Sometimes when Matt wakes in the night, he witnesses this scene on his way to the bathroom. He never says a word to her, but pissing in his half-sleep, he makes a vow never to strive too hard for academic success. Why trade hard classes for even harder classes? She watches him as he silently walks back to his bedroom. Back in bed he notices the thin line of light under his closed bedroom door. He pities her.

 

One night after dinner, Matt plays Mega Man 2 in the kitchen while his parents watch Columbo in the living room. Mallory’s in her room practicing runs on her flute. Now that the marching band competitions are over, she’s learning a few solos in the hopes of making all-district band—an extracurricular ensemble students from all over the eastern half of the state audition to play in. It’s a classical piece, and the sixteenth-note run she practices is swift and complicated. As he blasts flying buzz saw blades at mechanized birds and gorillas, he shudders at the shrillness of the instrument. For fifteen minutes she’s played the run at a faltering tempo, stumbling over the notes, missing accidentals. In the next ten minutes she learns the fingerings and picks up momentum, hitting each note with clarity, until at last she’s found she can play it perfectly—perfect notes, perfect pitch, perfect timing, over and over, and when a mechanized rooster takes his last man, Matt curses and pounds his fist on the kitchen counter hard enough it resets his Nintendo. The screen blinks and the game’s opening animation begins anew. The game is lost.

 

He opens her bedroom door. “Can you shut the hell up? You’ve been playing that same piece of shit for hours.”

 

“I’m practicing for all-district.”

 

“Well, play something different; you’re making me crazy.” He slams her door and goes back to the kitchen.

 

“Matt,” he hears his mother say.

 

“Leave her be,” his father says.

 

He selects a new first boss, Crash Man, from the screen as his sister starts slowly playing a chromatic scale.

 

“Oh, God.”

—

Mallory drives them both to school. Sometimes she puts on her makeup in the rearview mirror while she drives. Matt insists on sitting in the back seat because it gets on her nerves. He likes to pretend she’s his chauffeur. When he does this, he attempts a British accent and pretend-reads an imaginary newspaper. He says things like “Tallyho!” and inquires about the current price of “petrol.” Some days he lies down in the back seat.

 

Near the end of the school year, Mallory has a bad week. She learns that even though she will be a junior marshal for graduation, her best friend Shannon will be head marshal because her GPA has surpassed Mallory’s by a few hundredths of a point. As head marshal, Shannon will be wearing the coveted red sash over her white dress rather than the standard navy blue. Yesterday the band director informed her that she did not make all-district band this year in spite of a near-flawless audition. To add to these calamities, she still doesn’t have plans for the prom. These all weigh heavily on her mind one morning as she applies eye shadow on the way to school. The roads are wet, and they are running late as usual. Matt is prostrate on the back seat, his face resting on a duck-print pillow he grabbed from the living room couch, when he feels his stomach fall with the screech and skid of tires on wet asphalt, followed by the jolting GHUZZS of the Honda’s front bumper and hood colliding with the back end of an older lady’s Buick LeSabre. The impact rolls Matt and his pillow harmlessly into the foot of the back seat. Everyone’s shaken, but nobody’s hurt. Busted radiator, burnt rubber, engine smoke, fire truck, sirens, strobes, police, license-registration, insurance, telephone numbers, classmates driving by, disappointed father, more tears, and all of it while standing in the rain.

 

But Matt’s a few years from learning how to console another human being, let alone his sister. He doesn’t even give her a hug there in the rain before the melee arrives, an unfortunate detail from this memory she’ll never forget. Sensitivity is the kind of thing that gets you punched in the arm in the hallways, roughhoused or head-locked outside the locker-rooms, verbally emasculated in the cafeteria, always in front of the prettiest girls, and always at the hands of the most abnormally tall or muscular boys.

 

Mallory exiles herself to her bedroom nightly. She doesn’t study quite as much. The prom feels less important, and being “good” at anything seems like a dream deferred. She no longer has a car. The world has become a quiet, claustrophobic, suffocating mess.

 

But time begins to heal her eleventh-grade wounds. Soon music comes from her bedroom again starting with her favorite classical pieces, but also a few jazz standards, ballads mostly. She again pours herself into precision, practicing scales, arpeggios, and new songs. As a result of her proficiency, the summer before her senior year, she’s progressed to section leader in the marching band. Before the start of band camp, the band instructor loans her a piccolo, a new flute half the size of her old one, an octave higher in range. This transition further renews her zeal for music, and she plays twice as much on the shrill new instrument.

 

Matt loses it.

 

One Saturday night his sister leaves with friends to go eat by-the-slice pizza at the food court. Matt rummages through her book-bag, through her closet, and under her bed for the piccolo case. He finds the case under a pile of clothes.

 

Matt hops on his bike, pedaling furiously eight, maybe ten miles. When he finds a road that looks desolate enough—no houses or anything too close, just woods—he stashes his bike in the ditch, walks through the forest a bit, and flings the case into the air as far as he can. He hears it bounce twice in the fallen leaves, and then silence.

 

There are many kinds of silence to a boy of fourteen: there’s the grim, caustic silence of scribbling sentences and filling of bubbles meant to measure the scope of his future; there’s the anguished silence of ever-smoldering swallowed words when fear of adult authority trumps his sense of justice; there’s the wakeful silence he feels, stirring and restless, groaning in his lengthening bones before he finally sleeps; and there’s the possessing, lonely silence when he first understands his actions are no longer those of the man he envisions himself becoming.

 

He remembers how pathetic she looked in the rain the day she totaled her car, her frizzy hair, her unfinished makeup streaking down her face. By the time I’m home, she’ll already know, he thinks, and he wonders if she’ll ever forgive him. He begins to walk back to his bicycle, but then, no, he turns in the direction he believes he threw the instrument. It’s a nearly moonless night and his only light, he recalls, is affixed to his bike. He kicks around leaves in the darkness hoping his shoe will land on the small case. Suddenly, one step finds him up to his knee in a hole a dead tree has left behind. It’s hopeless without a light.

 

He walks, one minute, two in the direction he believes his bike to be. He’s soon aware he’s walked longer now returning than upon arriving, but he can’t yet see the edge of the woods. His breathing quickens. He’s sweating now and close to panic. Get quiet and calm down, he thinks. He stands there in the woods, controlling his breath, trying to remain motionless so that even the leaves under his feet are quiet. Alone he waits, listening through the silence for anything at all. Eventually, he hears the faraway sound of a passing car. With a sigh of relief, he follows the memory of the sound out of the forest. He walks up and down the road a few times until he stumbles over his bicycle.

 

In his fear he’d momentarily forgotten the flute, but as he begins pumping the pedals homeward, knowing what lies ahead, the enormity of it all takes his wind. His arms tremble at steadying the handlebars.

 

She’ll forgive me for this, he thinks. Tomorrow’s Sunday. I’ll come back. I’ll find it.

—

But Matt never finds the flute. His sister is more devastated than angry at first, and privately his parents contemplate corporal punishment before deciding he’s too old for a spanking. “He’s clearly upset,” his mother offers. His father agrees and decides waiting on a sentence is a nice phase-one for his punishment. Matt searches after church and every afternoon that week and the following weekend to no avail. After conferring with Mallory’s band director on the cost of the piccolo, Matt’s father arrives to a solution: Matt’s first job.

 

Matt makes minimum wage—almost five dollars an hour—at a small shop in town called Computer Connections. He knows little about computers beyond Oregon Trail, Solitaire, and control-alt-delete, but the proprietor finds busy work. At fourteen he can only do a couple hours on school days, and his father finds him unpaid labor in chores at home on the weekends, so by the time Matt’s earned enough to pay for the piccolo, Mallory, through hard work and strategic scheduling, satisfies the academic requirements of the state a semester early, and she moves away to start college in the new year.

 

On the day of the long-awaited recompense, he hands the money—to the tune of at least twelve decent Nintendo games—over to his father, who writes a check to the band director, who thanks him on behalf of the county school system and promptly deposits the check into his own personal account to help pay for an in-ground pool he plans to have installed in his backyard that summer. All those hours spent dusting and defragging customer computers, stocking recordable CDs, cables, and hardware, manning the register and phone, he felt sure settling his debt would feel better. However, in the coming years, when he recalls the whole business, Matt will always remember how hollow paying the debt felt in Mallory’s absence, how quiet those four months were without her music, and how back then he wondered if his sister kept someone else’s brother or sister up all night, studying and practicing in her dorm room.

 

“The Hidden Flute,” a companion story to this one, appears in 42.1 of the print Florida Review.
To find out what happens to the piccolo, order a subscription or copy of 42.1.

 

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Daughters of a Revolution

“Daughters of a Revolution” is published in cooperation with the Self Narrate project, and the in-video “subscribe” button connects with their site. To subscribe to Aquifer, please click the orange RSS button at the bottom of the page.

 

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Two Views of Florida

Rita Ciresi is our 2017 Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook contest winner
for her collection of micro-stories Second Wife,
published in cooperation with Burrow Press
and available for purchase here.

 

I. The first time I hear the thudding overhead—so loud the windowpanes vibrate—I think someone’s rooting around upstairs. Then I remember we’ve just moved to Florida, our house is one-story, and we don’t have an attic.

 

A squirrel must be trapped in the upper wall, or gutter, or one of those weird parts of the house I didn’t even know existed until the home inspector walked us through the property, speaking in what to me was a foreign language:  check throat, cricket, fascia, scuttle, scuncheon.   

 

Since moving to the Sunshine State, I’ve gotten myself into a heap of trouble calling 9-1-1:  after I spotted a long, slithery snake in our backyard (“This is Florida, ma’am,” the dispatcher told me, “and they live here too.”) and when I spotted black smoke belching in the distance (“This is Florida, ma’am, and that’s called a controlled burn.”)

 

What would the dispatcher tell me this time:  This is Florida, ma’am, where burglars are common as alligators or This is Florida, ma’am, and you better get used to raccoons burrowing in your soffit?

 

The thudding continues, finally becoming so insistent I could swear Santa and his reindeer are on the roof four months too early.  I slip on my sandals and walk into the blazing sunlight.

 

On the ridge of our roof sit half a dozen black birds.  Buzzards or vultures?  They weren’t included on the home inspection tour, so I’m not sure what to call them, except grim and ugly.  Each has a hooked nose.  Beady eyes.  And a glossy feathered body that must weigh forty pounds.

 

Why are they on our roof and not our neighbors’? Don’t they know I’m superstitious enough to take them as a warning sign?  But of what—a lightning storm?  a sinkhole?  hurricane?  death?

 

Shoo, I say.  Like they’re cats or rats.  Shoo.

 

When that doesn’t work, I wing one of the pebbles lining the pathway onto the roof.  The noise startles one bird into hopping onto our neighbors’ roof.

 

Five rocks later, and the rest have moved over.

 

I go back inside, satisfied I’ve chased those birds off.  But this is Florida, ma’am.  It doesn’t take long to find out that just like hail and lightning, sinkholes and hurricanes, the buzzards will keep coming back.

 

II. Every Sunday morning we hear them coming. First the neighborhood dogs herald their arrival with a volley of angry barking. Then comes a hiss of flames and a pneumatic rush, as if God were pumping a huge set of bellows overhead.

 

The fleet of hot air balloons flies over our suburban Florida development at sunrise, their bulging fabric envelopes gaudy against the muted swath of pink and blue sky. The first is Easter-egg purple and forsythia yellow. The second, a neon-orange tomato. The next is an emerald green worthy of Dorothy Gale’s fabled ride from Oz back to Kansas. The last is studded with red, white, and blue stars and stripes.

 

Our dogs are gun dogs—bred not to startle at the crack of a rifle—so while our neighbors’ poodles and Chihuahuas and dachshunds yap at the balloons, our golden retrievers keep on sleeping. But I always step outside and look up. Sometimes the balloons fly low enough so I can see miniature people standing in their baskets. Once a bride in a white dress and a groom in a tux toasted me with a glass of champagne.

 

In just a few moments, the balloons will descend to the empty field behind our house. The baskets will bump to the grass and the fabric slowly deflate into colorful puddles. Yet for these precious few moments, every Sunday morning, they glide overhead. And I too soar.

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The Poverty of Stimulus

Emblems of dissent
Rousing new forms of resistance
Rejecting submission to mainstream belief
Referencing societal agreements
Revising the paradigm

Cultural Alarm
Considering the nature & context of truth
Constructing an argument for involvement
Questioning motivations & intentions
Commenting on the state of affairs

Dynamic Humility
Scouting language for this moment
Solemnizing diversity
Searching for equilibrium
Selecting the idiosyncratic
Salivating over the funky

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Mournful Meditation

Letters to My Father by Bänoo Zan

Piquant Press, 2017

Paperback, $18.50

 

Cover of Banoo Zan's Letters to My Father

 

A mournful meditation, Bänoo Zan’s Letters to My Father is a collection of forty-one poems, each charged with the turmoil that’s birthed in the meeting of grief and memory. If taken in one long gulp, its power will sear through you. A few sips of Bänoo Zan’s poetry will disperse deep into your soul, relieve your aches, and balm your losses. Its collective experience is disarming.

 

Zan dedicates her second poetry collection to her father, Parviz Ghanbaralizadeh, who passed away in 2012 in Iran, while she was striving to build a new life in Canada. When news reached Zan, she chose not to visit the funeral or memorial services held in her father’s honor. Removed from the scenes of bereavement taking place in her hometown, Zan turned her pen to a flowing, emotional outpouring of verses that expressed what was left unsaid and explored their complex relationship.

 

The painful reality that strikes out possibilities to reconcile or reconnect with the one who has passed on is central to this collection. The persona’s anguish makes her wish for death and doom, in hopes that it’ll bring her the reconnection she desires, a reconnection that wouldn’t be possible in life:

 

If you ever loved me

wish me a death so final

it would rescue the heart

from separation

If you are still somewhere

waiting for me—

prophesy my doom

 

There’s an evocative quality to Zan’s uncluttered and orderly writing style. Stripped down to their ultimate simplicity, the poems aren’t titled, just numbered, focused on the central vision of the poems. The emotions and situations that she probes are accessible to the reader, though laced with deeper complexities, as in poem number 41:

 

The river

mourns the ocean

every time

memory

proves shallow

 

The brief and bare sentences tie up with clear and distinctive imagery to offer a profound view of some of the most disquieting situations in life.

 

There’s an intimacy that seeps into the imaginings of Zan’s poetry, creating a soulful and transcendent narrative. With grief as a catalyst, Zan explores the posthumous reconciliation of a father and daughter, and couples it with a spiritually charged, introspective layer.

 

Throughout the collection, the persona tries to connect life with death, both functioning as depictions of herself and her father. She traverses the realities of what death represents, linking everything back to herself. Her father’s death becomes a mirror that reflects the turmoil within her. The collection’s opening poem evokes a sense of longing that sets the tone:

 

I want you back

from the red of brown

to the blue of green

back from the phallus of death

to the womb of life

from unknown harmony

to known horrors

 

The poem circles back to the verse, “Leave me with you / as death with life,” an idea that the persona often reconstructs to portray an attachment that exists beyond death. She tries to search for her own emotional equilibrium in her father’s absence and recognizes in herself the reverberations of the bond they shared while he was alive. She tends to look for a rendering of herself in what existed of him. In poem 11, she writes:

 

You were

a ghazal

meeting qasidas

from

your blood-land

I am your epitaph

 

She sees herself as a final remnant of his beloved existence. In the consecutive poem, the persona confesses her regret, “I wish I had / shared you / with me.”

 

With its emotional depth comes a universal appeal; at a core level, people form connections and experience loss similarly. We’re all made up of stories, and in Zan’s poetry the essence of the story is in moments of being and existing. These moments are powerful enough to resonate with the reader, regardless what their personal worldview may be.

 

One thing that adds to the universal appeal and strength of Zan’s poetry is her alignment of Islamic and Arabian traditions and prophetic stories with the symbolism in western myths. In her poetry she invokes Narcissus, Agamemnon, and Ophelia with the same ease with which she imagines herself as her father’s prayer rug. In poem 30, Zan writes:

 

If I were your prayer rug

I would water

your desert hands

with golab

 

Religious and cultural notions become instrumental in her attempts to understand death.

 

Bänoo Zan’s previous poetry collection, Songs of Exile, was the first to be published in English (Guernica, 2016). Songs of Exile touched upon themes that erupt from becoming an immigrant and also addressed socio-political issues related to gender, ethnicity, and colonization. In comparison, Letters To My Father is a deeply personal poetry collection, one that must have required bravery on Zan’s part to share with the world. Zan’s poetry is a reminder that the discord caused by shifting ideologies does not have to license the irreparable rupture of our blood bonds. In this, Letters To My Father becomes a persona’s cathartic attempt to reconcile with another in death, through poetry infused with life.

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